To Kill a Mockingbird Jeopardy

Review To Kill a Mockingbird with a free board on Scout, Atticus, the trial, and the novel's themes. Project it; students buzz in on their phones.

6 categories · 30 clues · Final Jeopardy · everyone buzzes in from their phone

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Every clue on this board

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The Finch Family

$200
This widowed lawyer agrees to defend Tom Robinson.
Who is Atticus Finch?
$400
The novel's narrator, Jean Louise Finch, goes by this nickname.
Who is Scout?
$600
The novel's first sentence mentions how this older brother of the narrator badly broke his arm.
Who is Jem?
$800
This sister of Atticus moves in with the family, determined to make the narrator more ladylike.
Who is Aunt Alexandra?
$1,000
This Black woman is the Finches' cook and housekeeper, and takes the children to First Purchase church.
Who is Calpurnia?

Maycomb Neighbors

$200
This small, imaginative boy from Mississippi spends his summers in town with his aunt, Miss Rachel.
Who is Dill?
$400
This widow who loves her flower garden is the children's friend and loses her house to a fire.
Who is Miss Maudie?
$600
This sharp-tongued old woman breaks her morphine addiction before she dies, and Atticus calls her truly brave.
Who is Mrs. Dubose?
$800
This white man who lives with a Black family lets the town think he is a drunk, though he drinks Coca-Cola from his paper sack.
Who is Dolphus Raymond?
$1,000
At the end, this county sheriff insists that Bob Ewell fell on his own knife.
Who is Heck Tate?

Boo Radley

$200
Boo's real first name is this, which Atticus uses when he formally introduces him to Scout at the end.
What is Arthur?
$400
Boo leaves small gifts for the children in a knothole of this kind of tree near the Radley place.
What is an oak?
$600
Among the gifts are two small figures of a boy and a girl carved from this material.
What is soap?
$800
Jem leaves this piece of clothing caught on the Radley fence, then finds it mended and folded when he goes back.
What are his pants?
$1,000
Nathan Radley ends the secret exchange by filling the knothole with this.
What is cement?

The Trial

$200
Tom Robinson is accused of assaulting this young white woman.
Who is Mayella Ewell?
$400
This father of the accuser spits in Atticus's face and later attacks Jem and Scout.
Who is Bob Ewell?
$600
Atticus shows Tom could hardly have beaten the accuser because this arm was crippled in a cotton gin accident.
What is his left arm?
$800
This Black minister lets Jem, Scout and Dill watch the trial from the Colored balcony.
Who is Reverend Sykes?
$1,000
Outside the jail, Scout unknowingly breaks up a mob by chatting with this farmer about his son.
Who is Mr. Cunningham?

Themes and Symbols

$200
Atticus tells his children it is a sin to kill this songbird, which Miss Maudie explains does nothing but make music.
What is a mockingbird?
$400
Atticus's advice to climb into someone's skin and walk around in it teaches this quality.
What is empathy?
$600
The rabid dog Atticus shoots in the street goes by this name.
What is Tim Johnson?
$800
Atticus tells Jem this means knowing you're licked before you begin but seeing it through anyway.
What is courage?
$1,000
Because it follows Scout's growth from innocence to experience, the novel is often classed as this German-named kind of coming-of-age story.
What is a bildungsroman?

Historical Context

$200
These state and local laws enforcing racial segregation shaped daily life in the novel's South.
What are Jim Crow laws?
$400
Harper Lee's novel was first published in July of this pivotal year for the civil rights movement, the year of the Greensboro sit-ins.
What is 1960?
$600
This 1931 Alabama case, in which nine Black teenagers were falsely accused of rape, is often compared to Tom's trial.
What is the Scottsboro Boys case?
$800
This writer, Harper Lee's childhood friend and the model for Scout's summer playmate, later wrote In Cold Blood.
Who is Truman Capote?
$1,000
Published in 2015 but written earlier, this manuscript shows the narrator as an adult returning home from New York.
What is Go Set a Watchman?

Final Jeopardy — Setting the Scene

Harper Lee set her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in this fictional Alabama town during the Great Depression.

What is Maycomb?

How to run this board

This board covers the whole novel: the Finch family and their neighbors, Boo Radley and the children's games, the trial of Tom Robinson, the themes of justice and empathy, the symbols Lee builds the book around, and the Jim Crow South of the 1930s that the story depends on.

Save it for after the class has finished the book, since several clues give away the ending. The Themes and Symbols column makes a good discussion starter, so let a correct team explain its answer in a sentence before moving on.

Handle the trial column with the same care you give it in discussion. A quick reminder of expectations before play keeps the energy on the text.

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