Teacher Resources
Teaching Steinbeck
Please browse the titles below for lesson plans that have been prepared by participants at the NEH Steinbeck Institute, 2007
How to Organize a Steinbeck Book or Film Discussion Group (PDF, 14MB)
The Long Valley
- Looking West: Steinbeck's Red Pony Stories
- Multiple Perspectives on “The Harness”
- Power, Acceptance, and Motivation in “The Snake” and “The Vigilante”
- Sacred Places
- Literary Tour Guide Project
Of Mice and Men
- Of Mice and Men and Place (pre-reading)
- Friendship in Of Mice and Men (pre and post-reading)
- Crooks, the Stable Buck: A Dialogic Approach to Character Study
- Getting to Know Curley’s Wife (Chapter 5 and after)
- Performance Theory: George on Trial (post-reading)
- A Closer Look at Setting in Of Mice and Men Through Poetry (post-reading)
- Chamber Theatre in the Bunkhouse (post-reading)
- Unit Plan for Of Mice and Men, Driven by Essential Questions (PDF)
- A Focus on Setting and Characterization
The Grapes of Wrath
- Character Development in The Grapes of Wrath (during reading)
- Literature as Social Change (during and post-reading)
- AP Assignments (post-reading)
- Creating Visual Metaphors of Place (post-reading)
- Photo Gallery Project (post-reading)
- Grapes as a Multigenre, Multivocal Text
- The Journalism Cycle: Personalizing the Harvest Gypsies (extension)
- Historical Background
Log from the Sea of Cortez
Cannery Row
- Deep Sea Metaphor Project (post-reading)
- Experiencing Place Through Photographs: Ricketts’ Cannery Row
- Doc's Life: Ed Ricketts and You
- Cannery Row Classification
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights
Cross-Text Lessons
- Three Voices Of The Vietnam Period: John Steinbeck, Senator William Fulbright, and Martin Luther King
- Reading Texts as Tide Pools
- Parallel Texts: “E Pluribus Unum” and Elements of Literature
- Tracing the Wasteland (Acts of King Arthur & The Grapes of Wrath)