Kurt Vonnegut
Lesson plans for
Slaughterhouse Five
| Biography and Background | | "Harrison Bergeron" | | Slaughterhouse Five |
Biography and Background
Kurt Vonnegut Remembered
In this NPR audio file, Vonnegut talks to
Fresh Air
host Terry Gross "about writing, censorship, and the experience of war."
Quotations by Kurt Vonnegut
An assortment of one-liners.
So It Goes: Examining the Life of Author Kurt Vonnegut
"In this lesson, students will consider how events, accomplishments, and beliefs shaped Kurt Vonnegut's body of work by creating one-pagers. They will then examine the factors that shape their own lives and create one-pagers about themselves."
"Harrison Bergeron"
Click here : these lesson plans have been moved to their own page.
Slaughterhouse Five
I am Very Real
In October of 1973 Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel,
Slaughterhouse-Five
, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language." Other books soon met with the same fate. On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy this letter. He didn't receive a reply.
In the Style of Ernie Pyle: Reporting on World War II
Students using writing by renowned WWII journalist Ernie Pyle as a model for their own researched writing about an event from WWII.
Letters of Note
A copy of the letter Vonnegut sent to his family upon his escape from a P.O.W. camp during World War II.
Reading
Slaughterhouse Five
to Battle Senioritis
In this blog post a teacher reflects on the power of responding to reading this novel.
Slaughterhouse Five
Background information, questions for discussion and writing by chapter, and related titles.
Slaughterhouse Five
Part of a unit on satire, this page includes handouts for chapters 1 & 2, a final essay prompt, and a letter from Vonnegut to his parents, written while he was a POW in 1945.
Click here
for an additional writing prompt related to chapter 9.
Slaughterhouse Five
vocabulary
Words are presented in context and with definitions. Follow links at the top for sections of the novel. Click on a word for pronunication, examples of other use, more.
War Literature: Final Projects
Scroll down to the tech-integrated activity, "Single Sentence Animations." Students are asked to convey visually the emotional power of a single sentence from their reading.
We Were There
Background information, primary documents and transcripts, photographs, discussion questions, writing tasks, and learning activities. Letters from the Civil War, WW II (p. 18-39), and Vietnam. 44 pages; Adobe Reader required.
World Book Club
Scroll down to the 2006 BBC interview of author Kurt Vonnegut.