Teaching Activities for "1984+20"

If you have resources or ideas you would like to contribute, please e-mail us at .

Avalanche, Aztek, or Bravada? A Connotation Mini-Lesson  (ReadWriteThink.org)  
Would you rather drive an Avalanche, an Aztek, a Bravada, a Suburban or a Vue? In this mini-lesson, students examine familiar car names for underlying connotations then proceed through a series of steps, increasing their control over language, until they select words with powerful connotations in their own writing.

Battling for Liberty: Tecumseh's and Patrick Henry's Language of Resistance (ReadWriteThink.org) 
This lesson extends the study of Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" speech to demonstrate the ways Native Americans also resisted oppression through rhetoric. By examining two speeches by Chief Tecumseh of the Shawnee alongside Henry's speech, students develop a new respect for the Native Americans' politically effective and poetic use of language.

1984 by George Orwell (Lorraine Cella, Westwood High School)

King, Jr.'s Words through Diamante Poetry  (ReadWriteThink.org)
Encourage your students to explore the ways that powerful and passionate words communicate the concepts of freedom, justice, discrimination, and the American Dream in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech by paying attention to the details of King's speech as they read and as they gather words to use in their own original poems.

Varying Views of America (ReadWriteThink.org)
Employing collaborative groups and graphic organizers, students analyze three poems: Walt Whitman's “I Hear America Singing,” Langston Hughes' “I, Too, Sing America,” and Maya Angelou's “On the Pulse of the Morning.” Through this analysis, they determine the influence of perspective on individual’s tone and point of view toward the same or a similar experience.

Traci's Lists of Ten  (Traci Gardner)
Ten News and Journalism Interrogations
Television Analysis Writing Projects
Election Time, Part I
Election Time, Part 2
Rhetoric of War Writing Projects
Conflict and Violence Activities

Voting! What’s It All About? (ReadWriteThink.org)
With an eye on creating a graffiti-wall mural at the end of this cross-curricular unit, students listen to information read aloud from a variety of sources as well as read from fiction and nonfiction books. Students participate in an ongoing exploration of information from current sources including child-oriented Web sites, newspapers, and magazines—all devoted to election and voting information.

Propaganda Techniques in Literature and Online Political Ads (ReadWriteThink.org)
After reading or viewing a text, students are introduced to propaganda techniques and then identify examples in the text. After examining these examples, students explore the use of propaganda in popular culture by looking at examples in the media. Students identify examples of propaganda techniques used in clips of online political advertisements and explain how the techniques are used to persuade voters. Finally students explore the similarities of the propaganda techniques used in the literary text and in the online political ads to explain the commentary the text is making about contemporary society.

Freedom of Speech and Automatic Language: Examining the Pledge of Allegiance (ReadWriteThink.org)
This lesson plan asks students to explore this rote learning and their own right to freedom of speech by examining the Pledge of Allegiance from a historical and personal perspective and in relationship to fictional situations in novels they have read. Using a novel such as Speak by Laurie Halse Andersen or Nothing But the Truth by Avi, students learn how the novel’s protagonist and other characters in the story deal with free speech issues in varying ways and are invited to think about pledges that they are willing to make and how they express their freedom of speech.