The big picture

At the end of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout finds herself standing on the Radley front porch, looking out at the neighborhood and realizing that Boo Radley had been watching their lives unfold.
One of the things about this novel that has always caught me was the neighborhood and the dynamic characters in the neighborhood. I had a neighborhood where children gathered in the summer for games or imaginative reenactments of TV shows (Gunsmoke was a favorite), and where dusk saw all the neighbor kids huddled under shrubs or behind posts or lying in dark shadows while someone counted to a hundred and then yelled, “Ready of not, here I come.” The map of our comings and goings was trampled into paths on vacant lots between friends’ houses. All the adults in the neighborhood knew us, and anyone’s grandma was everyone’s.
Some students still grow up in a similar neighborhood, but some don’t at all. I imagine a novel lesson plan that would bring all the people and places in the novel to life. Because the imagery is so visual for me, I want to incorporate visual images in the plan.
On day number one, as students arrive in class, they will see all the walls and bulletin boards empty of the usual posters and postings. At the front of the room will be a roll of 30”-wide, white paper, art supplies, and a stack of colorful, cast-off magazines for cutting and pasting, and copies of the Tom Swift, etc., novels mentioned by the children. (The Tom Swift book is just because I happen to have one in a collection of antique books.)
As the books are distributed, I will form groups of three or four students by arranging students in numerical order according to their book numbers.
With each description of a place or a character that occurs during the reading of the novel, a different group will be directed to use whatever materials the members choose to recreate the description as a poster and to post that poster on the wall.
When we are finished with the novel and with the posters, we should have a panorama of Maycomb surrounding us. The poster representing the Ewell residence and the geraniums in broken pots should give students a little insight into Mayella’s character and desperation.
After we have read the description that Scout makes as she stands on the Radley porch in front of the shutter from which Boo watched them, we will attempt to draw a map of the city of Maycomb.

The next day we will spend time in the computer lab checking out the website, www.epodunk.com/cgi-bin/genInfo.php?locIndex=61177 , that talks about Monroe, Alabama, the city which served as Maycomb’s model.

Of course, all of this will augment classroom discussion and the other aspects of the study of the novel. Hopefully it will serve to make the descriptions in the novel into tangible images.