A Pre-Reading Activity: "The Rocking-Horse Winner"

Here's a neat activity you can use with your class--it doesn't matter if it's English, history, math, or science!

Determine what you want your students to read--for me this time, its D.H. Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner."

Determine what concepts and words students will probably struggle to understand.  For example, one study guide (http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/) on the story tells us:

.......“The Rocking-Horse Winner” is a short story that incorporates elements of the fable, the fantasy, and the fairy tale. Like a fable, it presents a moral (although it does so subtly, without preachment). Like a fantasy, it presents chimerical events (the boy’s ability to foretell the winners of horse races, the whispering house). Like a fairy tale, it sets the scene with simple words like those in a Mother Goose story: “There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them. . . . There were a boy and two little girls. They lived in a pleasant house, with a garden, and they had discreet servants, and felt themselves superior to anyone in the neighbourhood.”   

So I have a few concepts (incorporates, fable, fantasy, fairy tale, and moral) and one vocabulary word (chimerical).  I would use this introduction to the story as a "hook" to capture students' interests.

What is a moral? How do we use morals in our lives?  What student isn't fascinated by fables, fantasy, and/or fairy tales?    These are stories from our childhood.  To "incorporate" means to 

Put or take in (something) as part of a whole; include. Contain or include (something) as part of a whole.

What are some things I can use as an example?  I could talk about colors--how the color green includes parts of blue and yellow; I could talk about the school population--how we have freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors; or I could talk about a popular movie--such as Twilight incorporating fantasy with love and a bit of adventure.  Nearly everything in our lives are part of some kind of incorporation--it makes life more interesting!

Now I ask students to tell me about their favorite fables, fantasy, and fairy tales.  Hooking them based on childhood experiences is usually a positive.  Allowing students to voice their opinions gives them some "buy-in" to the subject under discussion.  Then I would introduce the term "chimerical":

1. Created by or as if by a wildly fanciful imagination; highly improbable.

2. Given to unrealistic fantasies; fanciful. 

This word comes from the Greek myth--

Chi·me·ra also Chi·mae·ra (k-mîr, k-) n.

1. Greek Mythology A fire-breathing she-monster usually represented as a composite of a lion, goat, and serpent.

2. An imaginary monster made up of grotesquely disparate parts.

Now I have something that my students will be able to come back to later after reading the story.

Here are some vocabulary words (with definitions) from the story:

1. Lucre: informal terms for money
2. Shilling: an English coin worth one twentieth of a pound
3. Serene: characterized by absence of emotional agitation
4. Iridescent: varying in color when seen in different lights or from different angles
5. Quaint: marked by beauty or elegance
 

Other information from the study guide:

Setting
.......The action takes place in England in the years just after the First World War. The places include a home in an unidentified locale in or near London; London's Richmond Park; a car traveling to a home in Hampshire County, southwest of London; and Lincoln Racecourse in Lincoln, Lincolnshire. The narrator mentions major races in England well known to readers of the story when it first appeared in 1926.
Characters
Paul: Boy who knows that his mother does not love him or his sisters even though she outwardly shows affection and treats her children kindly. After Paul receives a rocking horse one Christmas, he rides it often and develops a strange intuitive power that enables him to correctly predict the winners of horses races. At racetracks, he wins thousands of pounds that he sets aside to defray his mother’s debts.
Hester: Paul’s mother. She becomes dissatisfied with her marriage after her husband fails to make enough money to support the elegant lifestyle that has put the family deep in debt.
Paul’s Father: Man who works in town and has promising prospects that never seem to materialize because, as his wife says, he is unlucky.
Bassett: The family gardener. He initiates Paul into the world of horse racing, and they becoming betting partners.
Oscar Creswell: Paul’s uncle and his mother’s brother. He provides Paul the money that the boy uses to make his first successful bet.
Miss Wilmot: The family nurse.
Paul’s Siblings: Two younger sisters, one named Joan and the other unidentified by name.
Chief Artist: Woman who sketches drawings for newspaper advertisements placed by drapers. Hester works for her to make extra money.

Point of View
.......D. H. Lawrence wrote the story in omniscient third-person point of view, enabling him to reveal the thoughts of the characters.
So now I have students read the story.