Since I was restricted from the wikispace where this should have been posted for reasons unknown (damn the man!) I will post my teaching idea here.

 

I think a great way to get students into the story with a performance activity would be to use audacity in order to recreate an audio version of Jim's first experience working in the fields.  There is plenty of dialogue, which will allow students to gain an understanding of the characters, and there are also plenty of sound effects to make between the work they are doing and nature.  I would most likely require students to create their own sound effects for the tools and farming aspect of the project, because it would be more fun to see how they represent the various sounds.  This would be an in class activity because there are plenty of characters in this scene as well as several sound effects to be created.  This task well represents the setting of the novel as well as the characters.