Animal Farm (George Orwell) is one of those books I didn’t like very much when I was a younger teacher. I didn’t have enough life experience to appreciate exactly how prophetic Orwell’s observations were. When I started my career in the late 1990s, we were living in an economic boom era in America, and cautionary tales about a dystopian society characterized by abuse of power and deprivation didn’t feel relevant. By 2009, the housing crash provided a sobering wakeup call, and Animal Farm started to feel relevant. Fast forward to 2023, and I swear to God, it feels like we’re living in the End Times.

Now that I’ve been teaching for a long time, I’m able to draw unflattering parallels between the characters and events in the novel and faculty meetings at school. I’ve personally played a number of roles over the course of two decades. I’ve been Snowball, eager to be the agent of transformation and change…only to be run out of town while someone else simultaneously ruined the heart of my idea and took the credit for what was left. I’ve been Boxer, putting my head down and vowing to “work harder” while internalizing systemic failures as personal shortcomings.

These days, I’m Old Benjamin. There’s something to be said for being a donkey; “donkeys live a long time.” If I’m going to survive the next seventeen years until I’m eligible to retire with full benefits, I’m going to need to play that mantra on repeat. Between the chorus of sheep bleating nonsense at the school board meetings, the greedy self-service of upper-level district Napoleons, and school voucher programs threatening to blow up my windmill, I’m focused on survival more than excellence. I’m not even sure if drinking a case of whiskey would help. However, if I were to find one hidden downstairs in the boiler room, I wouldn’t necessarily say no.

An irony has dawned upon me in recent years. The students who most need to read and understand the message of Animal Farm are also the same students most likely to struggle to read it: students with learning disabilities, students who are not proficient English speakers, students who struggle to concentrate or to process. These are the students most likely to suffer marginalization at the hands of authority figures. These populations, above all others, need to understand how to recognize manipulation and abuse of power. This book is a powerful allegory to teach those lessons…if the students can read and understand it.

I know a lot of teachers feel like reading the book aloud to students fixes the problem. I used to think that, too. However, if the words are too complex, hearing them may not be enough to create comprehension. Furthermore, there’s something special that happens when a person actually READS a book on their own. Independent reading at their current independent level allows students to stop, look again, and evaluate in a way that hearing someone else read without stopping cannot duplicate. I provide read-aloud audio for my adapted lit texts, so I believe in the power of oral storytelling. However, a recording allows them to speed up, slow down, or repeat in a way that sitting in a circle for story time cannot. In addition, plugging in earbuds and getting up and moving while listening can help some students process and focus.

My latest adapted literature project is Animal Farm. I used the text with my own students for some chapters and used Orwell’s original text for others, and it worked well for them. By the time we finished the book, they “got it.” I hope the lesson is one that they take with them into adult life.

Please hop over to TpT to check out E2E Adapted Literature: Easier-to-Read Animal Farm. You can listen and read along with several chapters on YouTube for free.

Keywords: low Lexile, lower Lexile, easy reader, easier to read, ELL, modified text, accommodated text, dyslexia friendly, classic literature, adapted literature, secondary ELA, animal farm, george orwell, study guide, summary guide, novel notes