Lesson Plans Walden

As students walk or view the setting, ask them to take note of the details of the surroundings and make a mental "snapshot" of the location in their minds. Once they return to class, have students write their notes during a focused writing session, making sure to capture the details of the setting. After the initial writing session, students can revise and polish their writing and create a class booklet of the nature walk, using the ReadWriteThink Printing Press.

This biography of Thoreau, published by the Academy of American Poets, links to a collection of online texts including Walden. After reading passages from Walden with your students, have them compare Thoreau's description of the pond with the photographs on this website. This entry on Thoreau includes a complete biography with links to related materials and readings.

The site provides extensive information about Thoreau, including links about his work as a surveyor and pencil maker. Students can keep a record of their own nature observations in a field journal, as described in this resource from the American Museum of Natural History. A number of diverse example pages, including drawings, charts, and narrative observations from the field journals of actual scientists, are included. Playing with Phonics and Spelling. Students use these sounds to write their own poems based on Dr.

Students whose first language is not English reflect on nature through readings, a visit to a green area, and bookmaking using the writing process and peer feedback.

Henry David Thoreau was born in - ReadWriteThink

Examining Transcendentalism through Popular Culture. Guide written by Richard J. Henry David Thoreau's Walden is one of those rare books that yields new insights no matter how many times one reads it. A book remarkably rich in ideas and images, it can be approached through a wide variety of reading strategies. Bill McKibben, in his introduction and annotations to this edition of Walden, attempts to guide the reader to a coherent view of the book as a "practical environmentalist's volume," a book that can help the reader to cope with real problems of life as we enter the twenty-first century.

This teacher's guide attempts to extend McKibben's approach to Walden into specific activities and questions that will help students to grasp the practical implications of Thoreau's ideas. Economy How much is enough? How do I Know what I want? After Reading Walden Resources Bibliography Before Reading Walden In preparing students to read Walden the teacher will want to give them some basic historical and biographical background about Thoreau.

Here are a few of the essential facts. Thoreau's America Henry David Thoreau born , died lived during a time in America's history when business and technology were beginning to dominate American lif e. Thoreau lived nearly all his life in Concord, Massachusetts, a small town about twenty miles west of Boston which showed this shift from an agrarian to an industrial America in ways that made him worry. Technology in the form of the Fi tchburg railroad, which reached Concord in , was already turning Concord into a suburb of Boston.

The railroad chugged past then, as it does today, only a few feet from the shores of Walden Pond. The railroad meant that Concord merchants could extend their buying and selling more easily beyond the bounds of the town and that farmers could shift from growing subsistence crops to growing cash crops to be sold to distant markets. It also meant that farmers could make extra money by selling off the ir woodlots for firewood to keep Bostonians warm, an enterprise in which Thoreau assisted them through his abilities as a surveyor.

Thoreau's family participated in the "quiet desperation" of commerce and industry through the pencil factory owned and managed by his father.

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817.

Thoreau family pencils, produced behind the family house on Main Street, were general ly recognized as America's best pencils, largely because of Henry's research into German pencil-making techniques. Thoreau understood early in America's history how dependent industrialization was on the exploitation of cheap labor. This exploitation was most obvious in the use of slavery to pick cotton in the South. Thoreau had some experience with runaway slaves, because the Thoreau family house was sometimes used by the "underground railroad" to hide slaves; Thoreau himself put at least one slave on the train to freedom in Canada.

He also witnessed and read about the exploitation of Irish and Chinese laborers to build the railroads. He himself experienced it, though more benignly, working in his father's pencil factory. In short, the business of America was rapidly becoming business, and through the westward movement and the inevitable destruction of natural resources and native cultures that accompanied it, America sought ever-expanding room for that business. Thoreau's Life During Thoreau's childhood, however, the railroad had not yet arrived, and Concord must have seemed a delightfully peaceful place.

Thoreau's parents would take their four children on picnics in the wooded areas around Concord, one of young Henry's favorite picnic spots being Walden Pond.

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Thoreau received his education at the public school in Concord and at the private Concord Academy. Proving to be a better scholar than his more fun-loving and popular elder brother John, he was sent to Harvard. He did well there and, despite having to drop out for several months for financial and health reasons, was graduated in the top half of his class in Thoreau's graduation came at an inauspicious time.

In America was experiencing an economic depression and jobs were not plentiful. Furthermore, Thoreau found himself temperamentally unsuited for three of the four usual profession s open to Harvard graduates: The fourth, teaching, was one he felt comfortable with, since both of his elder siblings, Helen and John, were already teachers. He was hired as the teacher of the Concord public school, bu t resigned after only two weeks because of a dispute with his superintendent over how to discipline the children.

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He applied for other teaching jobs as far away as Kentucky but could find none. For a while he and John considered seeking their fortunes in California, but at last he fell back onto working in his father's pencil factory. In he decided to start his own school in Concord, eventually asking John to help him. The two brothers worked well together and vacationed together during holid ays. In September they spent a memorable week together on a boating trip up the Concord and Merrimack rivers to Mt. Washington in New Hampshire. About the same time both brothers became romantically interested in Ellen Sewall, a frequent visitor to C oncord from Cape Cod.

But because of her father's objections to the Thoreaus' liberal religious views, Ellen rejected both proposals. When J ohn endured a lengthy illness in , the school became too much for Henry to handle alone, so he closed it. He returned to work in the pencil factory but was soon invited to work as a live-in handyman in the home of his mentor, neighbor, and friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was by then already one of the most famous American philosophers and men of letters. Since Thoreau's graduation from Harvard, he had become a protege of his famous neighbor and an informal student of Emerson's Transcendental ideas.

Transcendentalism was an American version of Romantic Idealism, a dualistic Neoplatonic view of the world divided into the material and the spiritual. For Emerson, "Mind is the only reality, of which all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena. Thoreau must have imbibed Transcendental-ism through almost every pore during his two years living with Emerson, though he would modify it to suit his own temperament by granting nature more reality than Emerson did.

During this period, the two men shared tragedy as well as philosophy. Within just a few weeks in February , Emerson's young son Waldo died of scarlatina, and Thoreau's brother died an excruciating death from tetanus. John's death af fected Thoreau so strongly that he himself developed psychosomatic symptoms of lockjaw. During his stay with Emerson, Thoreau had ambitions to become a writer and had received help from Emerson in getting some poems and essays published in the Tra nscendental journal, The Dial. But by he and Emerson decided that it might be good for him to establish contacts with publishers in New York, so Emerson arranged a job for him as tutor to the children of his brother William Emerson on Staten I sland.

Thoreau, however, quickly found both the teaching situation and the urban environment intolerable and returned again to his parents' home in Concord to work in the pencil factory. But life in his parents' home held problems for the budding writer. Work in the pencil factory was tedious and tiring, and, since his mother took in boarders, there was little quiet or privacy in the house.

Remembering a summer visit to the retreat cabin of a college friend, Charles Stearns Wheeler, he developed a plan to build such a cabin for himself where he could find privacy to write. He bought building supplies and a chicken coop for the boards , and built himself a small cabin there, moving in on the Fourth of July. His main purposes in moving to the pond were to write h is first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , as a tribute to his brother John, and to conduct an economic experiment to see if it were possible to live by working one day and devoting the other six to more Transcendental concerns, thu s reversing the Yankee habit of working six days and resting one.

His nature study and the writing of Walden would develop later during his stay at the pond. He began writing Walden in as a lecture in response to the questions of townsp eople who were curious about what he was doing out at the pond, but it soon grew into his second book. Thoreau stayed in the cabin at Walden Pond for two years, from July to September Walden condenses the experiences of those two ye ars into one year for artistic unity, and there is no need to expand here on what Thoreau himself says of them.

However, students may be interested to know what Thoreau leaves out of his description of those years.

Introduction To Thoreau's Walden

He leaves out or rather alludes to only briefly , for instance, his famous night in jail, which occurred in , and a trip to Maine that same year to climb Mt. Katahdin, a place with a much wilder nature than he could find around Concord. For details about these experiences, see the biograph ies listed in the bibliography. Thoreau would live only fifteen years after leaving Walden Pond.

A Week sold poorly, leading Thoreau to hold off publication of Walden, so that he could revise it extensively to avoid the problems, such as looseness of structure and a preaching tone unalleviated by humor, that had put readers off in the first book. Walden, which appeared five years later, was a modest success: After the Walden Pond years, Thoreau lived again in the Emerson home from to while Emerson was on a lecture tour in Europe, and then rented a room in his parents' home on Main Street.

He made his living by working in the pencil factory, by doing surveying, by lecturing occasionally, and by publishing essays in newspapers and journals. His income, howe ver, was always very modest, and his main concerns were his daily afternoon walks in the Concord woods, the keeping of a private journal of his nature observations and ideas, and the writing and revision of essays for publication.

He also took a series of trips to the Maine woods and to Cape Cod, which provided material for travel essays published first in journals and eventually collected into posthumous books, The Maine Woods and Cape Cod. Other excursions took him to Canada and, near the end of his life, to Minnesota. Thoreau died in his parents' home in of the tuberculosis with which he had been periodically plagued since his college years. He left behind large unfinished projects--a comprehensive record of natural phenomena around Concord and extensive notes on American Indians--but these promised neither the artistic unity nor the intensity of Walden.

Be prepared to address some of the following common misconceptions: Thoreau was a hermit. He never intended to isolate himself from others. He went into town r egularly, dined with family and friends, and received visits from them at the pond. Thoreau was a frontiersman, like Daniel Boone, living in the wilderness. Walden Pond is an easy minute walk from Concord's main street.

Even in Thoreau's d ay, it was a popular picnic and swimming spot, and there were no dangerous wild animals. Thoreau was essentially a loafer. Thoreau raised beans, did odd jobs, and did surveying to support himself. At the pond he also pursued an active schedul e of nature study.

When he lived with his parents he paid rent and worked in the pencil factory.

Have students discuss in small groups whether or not it would be possible today to live by working only one or two days a week. Could it be done? If no t, why? The trick here is for them to focus on reducing needs rather than increasing income. Have students write briefly about a special place where they find peace and refuge. An ability to recognize symbolism is crucial to read ing Walden. To prepare students for symbolic reading of Thoreau's description of nature, ask them to list things in nature to which we often attach symbolic meaning e. To help students to identify with Thore au's intense observation of nature, ask each student to choose a small plot of land--e.

Therefore, it is probably wise to read through the first few paragraphs of Walden when you first assign it, explicating the ideas, wordplay, and humor as you go. Here are a few places on which to focus: Because parts of Walden began as a lecture, the book's meaning sometimes depends on the reader's ability to sense shifts in emphasis, which in a lecture would be signalled by the speaker's tone of voice. Obviously, they weren't prepared to read Thoreau's Walden.

I was not convinced that my students would grasp the full intent and meaning of Thoreau's Walden without a little background, so I came up with an activity I thought might help them put Thoreau's work in perspective. I began the lesson by sharing with students a brief Thoreau biography. I used a biography that was included in my students' anthology, but you could just as easily present an online biography such as this one from Biography. Following are the 12 items Thoreau took with him when he headed into the woods at Walden Pond in Then I introduced to students a list of 12 basic items [see sidebar] Thoreau carried with him to Walden Pond.

I wanted them to create their own lists of items they might take if they were setting out to live with nature for a long period of time. Despite being armed with Thoreau's list, those high-tech kids found the task of narrowing down their own lists of back-to-nature items to be a difficult one. Their responses were a mixed bag. Comfort and convenience items often appeared near the top of their lists. Laughter is a plus in any lesson, and this activity brought no shortage of that. Besides cell phones, make-up, and frozen foods, some of the other "wilderness" items the students included were fans or air conditioners, pillows, a car, snack foods, bottled water, toothbrushes, toothpaste, soft drinks, and music.

Since everyone named at least one odd item, the laughter wasn't at anyone's expense -- and the inclusion of those humorous items helped focus students' attention on the most appropriate items. The next step in the lesson was to have each student indicate which of the five items on their individual lists was the most important one. Before letting them do that exercise, I focused their thinking by bringing up Thoreau's list again. We thought about the general headings his 12 items might be categorized under.

The students concluded that Thoreau's list seemed to break down into three categories: With those categories in mind, the students were able to see the bigger picture and make wiser selections. The next task was to discuss the items on their individual lists with an eye toward generating a single class list of five items. A lively discussion ensued and, eventually, they came up with a class list that reflected Thoreau's priorities. They narrowed their original responses to the following five items: Finally, we were ready to read Walden.

Our anthology included excerpts, but you might assign sections of an online version of Walden. The warm-up or focus activity had served its purpose. It had prepared students to read Thoreau's work with an underlying understanding of some of his beliefs. Now that the students better understood what Thoreau gave up to live in nature, perhaps they would find a deeper appreciation of his great experiment and his writing.

Although my students did most elements of this activity on their own, the next time I do this lesson I might try something different: Perhaps I'll arrange students into small working groups to discuss their original lists. Each group could talk through and prioritize those lists. Then I could introduce Thoreau's list and challenge students to come to their own small-group conclusions about the categories of items he gathered.

Finally, armed with those thoughts, students could work cooperatively within their groups to come to a consensus about the five most important items. Each group would then present their lists and their rationale to the class. Whatever changes I make to the lesson, however, it is one I will surely repeat. Although I used it in my American Literature class, this versatile lesson involves so many areas of the curriculum, it could be included just as easily in history, social studies, or science classes.

See Walden Pond Across the Curriculum below. And, because it is such an excellent lesson in perspective, this lesson might be used at many grade levels as well. Reading Walden can help ground high-tech kids in the realities faced by their ancestors. As I reflect on the lesson above, I see many ways in which Walden could be used to connect to other areas of the curriculum:.

Kathleen Modenbach is an English teacher in Louisiana's St.

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