Exploring Animal Farm

Seventh grade began their study of George Orwell’s Animal Farm by posting the animals’ Seven Commandments on the board.
 

Spoiler alert: these commandments, meant to be “an unalterable law by which all the animals on Animal Farm must live for ever after,” will begin to change by the end of chapter three.
 

The book was initially written as an allegory of the Russian Revolution.

 

The farm animals chase the farmer and his family off the property and set out to govern the farm themselves, until politics, power and personalities begin to interfere.
 

It’s an ideal text for Gordon’s seventh grade, a year when students study the wide sweep of US history while keeping a close watch on current events.
 

Students have already connected moments in first two chapters with King George and the American revolutionaries, resistance in Iran in the 1970s and the present day, and protesters combatting ICE in the Midwest.
 

Orwell may have written the book in 1946 as a very specific critique of a particular kind of twentieth century movement.
 

But eighty years later, it is working as a useful lens as Gordon’s young people tie together history that ranges over centuries and across continents.