Unit of Work: Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury’s seminal novel is a perennial favourite for middle schoolers. This 49-page unit of work has been tested successfully with a mixed-ability Year 9 (age 13-15) class and provides material for a full school term.

This unit focuses on close textual analysis. There is a mixture of tasks which gets students writing analytically, personally, and creatively, helping them to build up their own unique interpretation of the work, and eventually to express this in a formal essay.

• Commentary of each overarching section is given, and 70+ writing tasks cover the whole novel. The tasks cover a variety of levels from comprehension to complex inference and personal response.

• There is a brief, student-friendly explanation of what a close reading actually is and how to perform it, followed by a sample close reading of a short passage.

• Texts of Blake’s poem, ‘The Tyger’ and Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’.

• Practice assessment task based on short-answer questions, a close reading of a passage, and a creative question

• Five research tasksheets which can be done by groups during the novel study, as extension work for Gifted and Talented students, or as closure to a unit of study.
  The Atomic Bomb
  Memory
  Phoenix
  Railroads
  Rivers
  Each task comprises four sections, following Bloom’s taxonomy, and requires students to complete: a piece of contextual research, a close reading of a nominated passage, a free-form writing at length, and a creative piece.

• Five middle-school appropriate essay questions.

There is also a presentation on book-burning which can be used with this unit.