Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland is about to be on the minds of the public again with the release of Tim Burton’s version of Alice in Wonderland to hit theaters this year. This provides teachers an opportunity to create lessons around the excitement generated by this movie.

Alice in Wonderland is perhaps one of the most used fantasy stories in cross curricular studies, so teachers shouldn’t have a problem coming up with lessons. Lewis Carroll’s (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) book has been used in literature, art, social studies, and mathematics (not surprisingly since he himself was a mathematician), to name but a few.

Today we will focus on just one of the ways to use Alice in Wonderland, specifically Social Studies. The Library of Congress has a lesson plan called “Down the Rabbit Hole,” http://memory.loc.gov/learn/lessons/00/rabbit/, which uses the book to focus on American History by relating Alice in Wonderland to immigrant experiences in coming to America. As LOC states, ”When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, she found herself in a world where the rules had changed, her surroundings were unfamiliar, and the inhabitants spoke in strange tongues. Alice's journey is not unlike the experience of an immigrant who relocates to a new country.”

This lesson states it is primarily focused on middle schools grades, but it could be used in high school also, especially with the release of the film targeting their age group also. If you are an educator looking for a very detailed lesson plan this one might not be for you as it focuses on providing the general outline of the lesson, but leaves securing materials up to you. Don’t let this scare you off though, because your two big materials will be your text book and a copy of Alice in Wonderland, which is a work that is in the public domain so retrieving copies of the text is relatively easy. In fact it can be retrieved at Project Gutenberg, Alice in Wonderland http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11. Additional supporting materials will need to be gathered eventually, but the main part of the lesson is just to try to get students to compare Alice’s situation with that of an immigrant coming to America.

With the imminent release of the movie coming I’m am sure this will be just one of several lessons we will try to share with you for Alice in Wonderland.

Source: http://memory.loc.gov/learn/lessons/00/rabbit/