Searcher and Warburg/Octopus]
Post-reading:
1.Discuss these questions with your partner:
a. Where is the story set?
b. What kind of person is Mr Jones? Have the animals read him correctly?
c. The main characters so far have been mentioned by name. Here the most important one is Old Major, the pig. If you look behind the mere words, what is he talking about? What is he rousing the farm animals to do? How does he try to persuade them?
2. Major unites all the animals by pointing to a common enemy. Substantiate this statement with evidence from the text.
3. With this first chapter, Orwell sets the scene for the plot of the novel. What do we expect will happen? What will the story be about?
An extract from a novel
Characters and theme develop and the plot unfolds as one moves through a novel. It is important to take note of these elements, as they contribute to your understanding of the text.
In the activity below you will read extracts taken from later in the novel so that you can learn about the developments that have taken place.
Activity 1.6 - Reading an extract from a novel (individual and pair)
In these extracts the pigs have taken over the farm. The two leaders are Snowball and Napoleon. Snowball is also eventually chased off, giving Napoleon full power. The text below contains three different extracts from the novel.
Pre-reading:
Skim the text to see where each begins, and then read it to yourself or follow in your book while your teacher reads it to the class.
Animal Farm
by George Orwell
Snowball had made a close study of some back numbers of the Farmer and Stockbreeder which he had found in the farmhouse, and was full of plans for innovations and improvements. He talked learnedly about field-drains, silage, and basic slag, and had worked out a complicated scheme for all the animals to drop their dung directly in the fields, at a different stop every day to save the labour of cartage. Napoleon produced no schemes of his own, but said quietly that Snowball’s would come to nothing, and seemed to be biding his time. But of all their controversies, none was so bitter as the one that took place over the windmill.
In the long pasture, not far from the farm buildings, there was a small knoll which was the highest point on the farm. After surveying the ground, Snowball declared that this was just the place for a windmill, which could be made to operate a dynamo and supply the farm with electrical power. This would light the stalls and warm them in winter, and would also run a circular saw, a chaff-cutter, a mangel-slicer, and an electric milking machine. The animals had never heard of anything of this kind before (for the farm was an old-fashioned one and had only the most primitive machinery) and they listened in astonishment while Snowball conjured up pictures of fantastic machines which would do their work for them while they grazed at their
ease in the fields or improved their minds with reading and conversation.
[Snowball designs a windmill and eventually the animals begin to build it. Napoleon chases Snowball off the farm and assumes total power.]
All that year the animals worked like slaves. But they were happy in their work; they grudged no effort or sacrifice, well aware that everything that they did was for the benefit of themselves and those of their kind who would come after them, and not for a pack of idle, thieving human beings.
Throughout the spring and summer they worked a sixty-hour week, and in August Napoleon announced that there would be work on Sunday afternoons as well. This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half. Even so, it was found necessary to leave certain tasks undone. The harvest was a little less successful than in the previous year, and two fields which should have been sown with roots in the early summer were not sown because the ploughing had not been completed early enough. It was possible to foresee that the coming winter would be a hard one.
The windmill presented unexpected difficulties. There was a good quarry of limestone on the farm, and plenty of sand and cement had been found in one of the outhouses, so that all of the materials for building were at hand. But the problem the animals could not solve was how to break up the stones into pieces of suitable size.
…
Huge boulders, far too big to be used as they were, were lying all over the bed of the quarry. The animals lashed ropes round these, and then all together, cows, horses, sheep, any animal that could lay hold of the rope – even the pigs sometimes joined in at critical moments – dragged them with desperate slowness up the slope to the top of the quarry, where they were toppled over the edge, to shatter to pieces below. Transporting the stone once it was broken was comparatively simple. The horses carried it off in cartloads, the sheep dragged single blocks, even Muriel and Benjamin yoked themselves into an old governess-cart and did their share. By late summer a sufficient store of stone had accumulated, and then the building began, under the superintendence of the pigs.
Suddenly, early in the spring, an alarming thing was discovered. Snowball was secretly frequenting the farm by night! The animals were so disturbed that they could hardly sleep in their stalls. Every night, it was said, he came creeping in under cover of darkness and performed all kinds of mischief. He stole the corn, he upset the milk-pails, he broke the eggs, he trampled the seedbeds, he gnawed the bark off the fruit trees. Whenever anything went wrong it became usual to attribute it to Snowball. If a window was broken or a drain blocked up, someone was certain to say that Snowball had come in the night and done it, and when the key of the store-shed was lost, the whole farm was convinced that Snowball had thrown it down the well. Curiously enough, they went on believing this even after the mislaid key was found under a sack of meal.
[From: Animal Farm by George Orwell. 1976. London: Searcher and Warburg/Octopus]
Post-reading:
1.Discuss these questions with a partner:
a. Look at the references to Snowball and Napoleon. What do you learn about each character from this extract?
b. How does what happens to Snowball already deviate from what Major preached? Quote from the first chapter to substantiate your answer.
2. You know about the causes of climate change from what you read earlier in the cycle. Are the animals on the farm contributing to it in any way by what they are planning? Support your answers.
3. Can you relate what is going on in the extracts to any real life situation you know about?
Poem
| Here is information that can help you understand a poem. You can apply it to all poetry reading, including the unseen poem you will be given in your literature exams.Ask these two questions of any poem that you read:What is being said? This means you look for the main ideas, the themeHow do I know? This means you look at the ways in which the poet puts across the ideas.Writers write because they have something to say. We study the text to support, confirm, clarify and reveal what it is that they have to say. To do this, we look at figurative language, the way sentences, verse lines and the poem as a whole is presented, the choice of images, rhythm, pace and sound, and at the
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