Analyzing Fiction Text with Nearpod

In this lesson, students will be taking a closer look at some passages from Of Mice and Men. I will use a tool called Nearpod, which is an interactive slide show program that allows students to participate and answer in live time with the presentation and saves their answers for future reference/use.
The hook of the lesson is a short audio clip from the book, describing how George and Lennie are strolling down the street after getting off the bus. The focus of the lesson is how the author chooses to portray them. After the clip, students will answer a poll question asking, “Based on the clip, who do you think is more of a leader between the two men?” (man 1, man 2). Then, the lesson goes on to show students the next part of the text: the physical descriptions and mannerisms of the men themselves. After reading the passage, students will complete a “draw it” slide, underlining characteristics of man 1 in blue, and man 2 in red. Once students complete this task, I will flash anonymous examples up on the board so we can look as a class at what students answered.
The next slide is an additional passage from later in the book describing the characters. Students will then submit a short answer for the “collaborate” board explaining what they think George and Lennie look like at this point. Finally, the next slide is an artist’s interpretation of George and Lennie. While looking at both the artwork and the text, students will work to compare and contrast the two. The focus would be specifically on what details the artist chose to include and exclude based on the author’s passage.
The final slide would explain how important characterization is for stories; students will make predictions as to what type of personality traits these characters have based on how the author chose to physically describe them and their mannerisms.
All of these answers are saved on Nearpod’s report cloud in my account, I can go back and take a closer look at all students’ answers once I have time. In addition, I can show more answers as we continue to read the book and we can see as a class if their predictions were right or not.
This lesson is designed for college prep 10th grade students. This lesson covers LA AKS 3,4, and 7. Some key focuses are character development, character motives, and tone. In addition, AKS 7 involves comparing 2 mediums, in this case it is an excerpt of text and an artist's interpretation of characters.