This lesson contains 14 slides, with text slides and 5 videos.
Lesson duration is: 40 min
Items in this lesson
To Kill a Mockingbird
Slide 1 - Slide
Summary
To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel by Harper Lee. Written in 1960, it is set in the mid-1930s in the small town of Maycomb, Alabama.
Narrated by Scout Finch, a six-year-old tomboy who lives with her lawyer father Atticus and her ten-year-old brother Jem.
Scout, Jem and their friend Dill try to make their reclusive neighbour Boo Radley leave his house. Boo has not been seen in Maycomb since he was a teenager.
Slide 2 - Slide
Summary
Many residents of Maycomb are racists
Atticus is asked to defend Tom Robinson, a black man wrongly accused of raping a white woman, though everyone knows he has little hope of winning.
The reader sees the trial develop through the childlike eyes of Scout, as gradually both she and her brother learn some valuable life lessons from their father about tolerance, empathy and understanding.
Slide 3 - Slide
Setting
Maycomb, Georgia
The Great Depression - 1933-1935
Jim Crow laws
Racial tension
Published in 1960 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement
Slide 4 - Slide
Maycomb was fictional and based on Monroeville, Alabama where the author grew up
Slide 5 - Slide
Historical Background
Great Depression
Stockmarket crash 1929
Lots of families plunged into poverty
Slide 6 - Slide
Historical background
Slavery was abolished in 1864, towards the end of the American Civil War, but Southerners still believe in white supremacy.
Segregation exists.
Blacks may not sit in the same sections as whites. They have separate facilities as well, known as Jim Crow laws.
Lesson duration is: 40 min
