The Lottery

• Engels
• Middelbare school
• vwo
• Leerjaar 4

The Lottery

by Shirley Jackson

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What would you do if you won the lottery? List the first five things you would do with your winnings.

After 10 hours on the job, the greeter at Wal-Mart gave everyone a perfunctory "hello" while mostly staring at his cell phone and reading text messages.

Based on the sentence above, what does the word perfunctory mean?

1. acting with enthusiasm and with energy
2. acting with sadness and dismay
3. done routinely with little interest or care
4. done with anger toward others

What are some synonyms and
antonyms for "perfunctory"?

Today's learning goal is: I can identify the setting of “The Lottery” and explain how the setting helps establish the story’s initial mood.

Do you know how to identify a story's setting?

😒🙁😐🙂😃

The Setting

o The story’s location.

o The time in which the action takes place.

o The social environment of the characters, including the manners, customs, and moral

values that govern their society. 

Setting is the physical location and time in which a

story takes place. 

To identify setting, we must note the

specific details the author provides concerning:

Once you've identified the story's setting, you can identify the mood by asking:

What things, thoughts, or feelings do I typically

associate these details with?

For example:

If the setting is a decrepit, abandoned, and old building, I might feel tense or anxious since I’ve seen many scary movies where

something bad happens in these types of locations.

or

 If the setting is a warm, sunny beach, I feel

relaxed.

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns, there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than

two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner. 

Highlight or underline the details that identify the setting. 

• How does the author describe the day? 
• What other details can you find? 
• What mood is the author trying to create? 

Morning + summer + flowers bloom. 

Mood = carefree, joyful.

How can this help us predict the rest of the story?

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns, there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 26th, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than

two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner. 

Highlight or underline the details that identify the setting. 

• How does the author describe the day? 
• What other details can you find? 
• What mood is the author trying to create? 

Morning + summer + flowers bloom. 

Mood = carefree, joyful.

How can this help us predict the rest of the story?

Do Now

Read The Lottery and take notes on:

• The characters: Tessie and Bill Hutchinson, Old Man Warner

and Mr. Summers

• The setting
• The mood

Setting can be best defined as:

1. The emotional effect or feeling that a text creates in a reader.
2. The background information that is important to a text.
3. The physical location, time, and social environment in which a story takes place
4. The steps a reader takes to use details to determine what may happen next in the story.

Mood can be defined as....

What is the setting of “The Lottery?” What mood do these details establish, and what does this lead you to think about the lottery that’s about to occur? Use complete sentences and evidence from the text to support your answer.