Of Mice and Men: Chapter 4: Crooks

Two lessons and an essay plan + example about chapter 4 and Crooks in Of Mice and Men.
The first lesson starts with a close look at the opening description of Crooks’ room, asking pupils to pick out lines which give us a clue about his personality from just the first couple of pages.
From there, pupils read up to Candy’s arrival in the chapter, and are challenged to consider what themes Crooks teaches us about. Key quotations relating to the themes are picked out, which make for good starters for discussion and are also important quotations for pupils to annotate and learn. From there, pupils answer questions about how Crooks relates to these themes.
The second of these lessons focuses more on the novel’s context. Pupils are taught about the Jim Crow laws and the concept of lynching, before going on to read the remainder of the chapter and discussing how we can see evidence of this treatment of black people in the novel.
From there, pupils are challenged to plan and write an essay about Crooks and his importance in the novel. These resources include a suggested planning sheet (I’ve written this for a lesson when I know I’ll be absent, so pupils should be able to work through that fairly independently), and the start of an example essay (intro and first two paragraphs). You could use the example in various ways: you could give the opening to pupils and challenge them to carry on, or you could use it as an example once you’ve marked the essays and challenge pupils to improve their own work.

I’ve written these lessons for a fairly low ability GCSE class, hence the structured essay plan. You could easily make this more challenging by providing less structure for the essay, or asking them to come up with their own discussion points about how Crooks relates to the novel’s themes.