Animal Farm teaching pack

Last updated: 15/11/2023
Animal Farm cover
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Key stage
Resource type
Teaching pack

Develop your GCSE students’ critical reading skills with our chapter-by-chapter look at this famous text.

Character and close text analysis, research tasks, role play, quizzes and exam style questions combine to support your students’ understanding of the story of Napoleon, Snowball and their comrades.

What's included?

  • 20 creative lessons
  • exam-style questions for AQA, Edexcel and OCR
  • activities to develop students’ critical reading skills in preparation for the GCSE.

What's inside?

Introduction (page 4)

Specification summaries (page 5)

Chapter 1: Lesson 1 (pages 6-16)

  • Resource - story checklist
  • Resource - allegory / fairy tale Bingo

Chapter 1: Lesson 2 (pages 17-27)

  • Resource - character traits card sort
  • Resource - sources of satire
  • Resource - Karl Marx, Old Major match up

Chapter 2: Lesson 3 (pages 28-34)

  • Resource - cause and effect
  • Resource - symbolism in Animal Farm
  • Resource - Communist Manifesto matching activity

Chapter 2: Lesson 4 (pages 35-40)

  • Resource - getting to know the pigs

Chapter 3: Lesson 5 (pages 41-45)

  • Resource - putting in the work
  • Resource - getting to know Boxer

Chapter 3: Lesson 6 (pages 46-52)

  • Resource - animals and literacy
  • Resource - implied meanings

Chapter 4: Lesson 7 (pages 53-55)

Chapter 4: Lesson 8 (pages 56-59)

  • Resource - what part do the animals play?

Chapter 5: Lesson 9 (pages 60-63)

Chapter 5: Lesson 10 (pages 64-68)

  • Resource - Democracy or Dictatorship?

Chapter 6: Lesson 11 (pages 69-74)

  • Resource - persuasive techniques
  • Resource - animals’ attitudes to work

Chapter 6: Lesson 12 (pages 75-79)

  • Resource - propaganda posters

Chapter 7: Lesson 13 (pages 80-85)

  • Resource - how to bury bad news

Chapter 7: Lesson 14 (pages 86-90)

  • Resource - Squealer’s sneaky tactics

Chapter 8: Lesson 15 (pages 91-94)

  • Resource - the cult of Napoleon
  • Resource - manipulation of facts

Chapter 8: Lesson 16 (pages 95-97)

Chapter 9: Lesson 17 (pages 98-105)

Chapter 9: Lesson 18 (pages 106-112)

  • Resource - epitaphs and obituaries

Chapter 10: Lesson 19 (pages 113-120)

  • Resource - what happened to the animals?
  • Resource - coming full circle
  • Resource - Animal Farm map
  • Resource - word cloud
  • Resource - coat of arms

Chapter 10: Lesson 20 (pages 121-132)

  • Resource - pig or human?
  • Resource - familiar with the farm
  • Resource - plotting the rise and fall

Exam practice (pages 133-153)

  • AQA style questions
  • Edexcel style questions
  • OCR styles questions

This is an example of a student activity from the Animal Farm teaching pack. 

Coming full circle

One of Orwell’s goals in writing Animal Farm was to portray the Russian Revolution and show that often a rebellion doesn’t change things for the ‘workers’, in fact they can often be worse off than before.
Match up the quotations on the left (taken from the beginning of the book) with those on the right (taken from the last chapter). Arrange them in a circular way so you can see how things have come full circle. 

Our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

 

Some day it [the Rebellion] was coming.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.

 

… from pig to man again; but it was impossible to say which was which.

I do not know when the Rebellion will come.

 

They were generally hungry, they slept on straw, they drank from the pool, they laboured in the fields.

Jones will sell you to the knacker.

 

Boxer was forgotten.

All the habits of man are equal.

 

Neither pigs nor dogs produced any food by their own labour.

Animal Farm pack
£15.00
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All reviews

Have you used this resource?

5

15/02/2021

It was very good and would highly recommend.

Adrian Jordan

19/11/2020

good:)

elif ak

12/11/2020

5

06/09/2020

5

15/02/2021

It was very good and would highly recommend.

Adrian Jordan

19/11/2020

good:)

elif ak

12/11/2020

5

06/09/2020

5

29/05/2020

5

22/05/2020

5

08/12/2019

Great resource with lots of great ideas. Thank you!

Dominique Lane-Osherov

11/09/2017

Very informative thanks

08/07/2016

Looks really rather excellent. Might be nice if on this page they also had the powerpoints linked directly (but I'll just add them to saved resources later!).

24/06/2016