Year 9 Library Skills Booklet

NAME:TEACHER:

Every library lesson, we will read a passage related to Of Mice and Men.

There will also be a homework task for you to complete.

Reading 1 The Great Depression Page 2

Reading 2 John Steinbeck Page 7

Reading 3 The Dust Bowl Page 12

Reading 4 Life of a Migrant Worker Page 18

Reading 5 Im Not A Tart! Page 24

Reading 1 The Great Depression

Pre-Reading Think-Pair-Share Activity

Look at the photograph above.

When was this photograph taken? How can you tell?

Why are the people crowding around the building? What do they want?

How might the people feel?

This weeks reading comes from the BBC GCSE bitesize History section on the Great Depression.

1

BBC Bitesize The Great Depression

Notes from class discussion

Focussed Questions

Using your notes from the class discussion, answer these questions below:

1. In the Causes of the Depression section, why are some of the words in bold?

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2. What was a Hooverville?

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3. a) Using the quote in the first paragraph, outline the punctuation rules for direct speech.

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b) Using those rules, write down what someone living in a Hooverville might have said to Herbert Hoover when he was campaigning in 1932.

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4. Using facts from this reading, create a simple timeline of the Depression in the USA.

5. Why do you think that America entering WW2 led to the full recovery of their economy?

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6. How many people died from starvation? Why does the author of this section imply that this doesnt tell the whole story?

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7. Explain why someone might think that a different picture would more accurately fit in with the reading.

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Extended Response

Find evidence that suggests Lennie and George from Of Mice and Men have been affected by the Great Depression.

Use facts from this reading and from your novel.

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Homework The Empire State Building

Research facts about the Empire State Building. Use the internet or library books.

Where it is:

When it was completed:

How long it took to build:

How tall it is:

A famous movie that it was in:

Who built this building and why did they build it?

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While this was being built, people were living in Hoovervilles in the same city. How do you think they would have reacted to it being built?

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Based on your research, do you think that the building of the Empire State would have been a good thing or a bad thing for the Depression? Explain your answer.

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Reading 2 John Steinbeck

Pre-Reading Think-Pair-Share Activity

Complete the following three vocabulary windows.

The first is done for you as an example.

You need to fill in the remaining three boxes of the other two.

WORD

freelance

WORD FUNCTION

adjective

DEFINITION

Self employed and hired to work for different companies on particular jobs

WORD IN A SENTENCE

John, who was an artist, often took on freelance work to earn more money.

WORD

ambitious

WORD FUNCTION

DEFINITION

WORD IN A SENTENCE

WORD

dispossessed

WORD FUNCTION

DEFINITION

WORD IN A SENTENCE

WORD

collaboration

WORD FUNCTION

DEFINITION

WORD IN A SENTENCE

JOHN STEINBECK

Early Years

Famed novelist John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. Steinbeck was raised with modest means. His father, John Ernst Steinbeck, tried his hand at several different jobs to keep his family fed: He owned a feed-and-grain store, managed a flour plant and served as treasurer of Monterey County. His mother, Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, was a former schoolteacher.

For the most part, Steinbeckwho grew up with three sistershad a happy childhood. He was shy, but smart, and formed an early appreciation for the land, and in particular California's Salinas Valley, which would greatly inform his later writing. According to accounts, Steinbeck decided to become a writer at the age of 14, often locking himself in his bedroom to write poems and stories. In 1919, Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford Universitya decision that had more to do with pleasing his parents than anything elsebut the budding writer would prove to have little use for college.

Over the next six years, Steinbeck drifted in and out of school, eventually dropping out for good in 1925, without a degree.

Early Career

Following Stanford, Steinbeck tried to make a go of it as a freelance writer. He briefly moved to New York City, where he found work as a construction worker and a newspaper reporter, but then scurried back to California, where he took a job as a caretaker in Lake Tahoe. It was during this time that Steinbeck wrote his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929), and met and married his first wife, Carol Henning. Over the following decade, with Carol's support and paycheck, he continued to pour himself into his writing.

Steinbeck's follow-up novels, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), received tepid reviews. It wasn't until Tortilla Flat (1935), a humorous novel about paisano life in the Monterey region, was released that the writer achieved real success. Steinbeck struck a more serious tone with In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Long Valley (1938), a collection of short stories.

Widely considered Steinbeck's finest and most ambitious novel, The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939. Telling the story of a dispossessed Oklahoma family and their struggle to carve out a new life in California at the height of the Great Depression, the book captured the mood and angst of the nation during this time period. At the hei