Classroom Activities
Classroom activities for this unit will primarily be focused on a) helping students identify and consider the tone of a text, b) helping students identify and establish the author's purpose in writing, c) prompting students to consider and discuss the effectiveness, significance and meaning of text, and d) encouraging students to express their own feelings and convictions about topics in the texts used in this unit.
Before Reading Activities
The following three activities are designed to be done successively as they all require the same premise. Before giving students the poem in its entirety, teachers should break down the poem into an alphabetical list of all of its vocabulary words, thus eliminating any degree of cohesion and possibility for comprehension. Words like "the" or "have" and conjunctions should be omitted. Using adjectives, nouns, and adverbs should be the primary focus. These words will then be typed onto a handout that can be passed out to the students. Because we want to encourage students to arrive at independent conclusions, the poem's title and author's name should be omitted from the handout.
5 Words – 5 words is an activity that students can do individually or with a partner. It is designed to help students gain an understanding of the tone and mood of a text by choosing and interpreting vocabulary from a text that gives insight into the author's intention. As mentioned above, the premise of this activity requires a poem to be broken down into an alphabetical list of its vocabulary words, and printed onto a handout that can be passed out to each student.
To execute this activity, give students the handout that contains the list of vocabulary from the deconstructed poem. Give students 2 minutes (or longer, depending on the size of the poem) to silently read all of the vocabulary words on the handout. Next, ask students to choose five words from the handout that they feel are most powerful, significant or meaningful. Even more importantly, you may ask students to choose five words that best hint at what the poem is about. Inform students that they will be asked to share their five words. Give students 60 seconds to perform this section of the activity.
When students are finished, ask them to share the words they chose. Record the words students chose on a large piece of butcher paper. This will help illustrate patterns and commonality between the students, as many words will appear repeatedly. Pose questions to the students about the nature of vocabulary used in this poem. What type of words are these? What kinds of imagery do we see when thinking about these words? What are the denotative and connotative meanings of these words? What do you think this poem is about? What is the subject of the poem? How does the author feel about the subject of the poem?
After students have finished sharing, and a completed list of words has been created near the front of the class, underline the top 5 words that were chosen most often by the students. This new set of 5 words can be used as a springboard for a discussion about subject of the poem, the author's feelings towards the subject of the poem, and the intention of the poem.
Gimme Some Value – It is suggested, but not required, that this activity be implemented right after the above mentioned activity, "5 Words." This activity is designed to help students identify and examine the denotative and connotative meaning of rich vocabulary within a text. Students will be assigning value to each word in the poem, under the headings positive, neutral or negative. The primary goal of this activity is to help students determine the author's purpose, but even more so, the poem's tone.
Similarly to the "5 Words" activity, "Gimme Some Value" requires students to have an alphabetized list of a poem's vocabulary. It is ok for students to use the same handout from "5 Words" despite its presumed annotation.
For this activity, students can work independently or in pairs. Ask students to examine the vocabulary from the text and consider the conclusions that arose from the previous activity. Inform students that they will be assigning a value to each word: positive, negative or neutral. Students can annotate each word by writing the following symbols above each word: (+) positive (-) negative and (o) neutral. Remind them that there is no right or wrong answer, and it is not only likely, but encouraged, that different students will assign different values to different words. Model this exercise with your students using two or three vocabulary words from the text. Give students approximately three minutes to complete this exercise.
Once students have completed this exercise, use a copy of the handout on an overhead projector or smart board to supplement the next section of the activity. As a class, go down the list of words on the handout, asking students to raise their hands for each word they annotated as positive. Repeat this process for vocabulary words that were marked negative. Pose a line of questions to the class that aims to encourage a discussion about the tone of the poem: What kinds of words are used in this poem? What trends do we see about the types of words used? Are the words good or bad, or neither? Why do you think the author chose to use such ______ type of words? What do these words say about the subject of the poem? What do these words tell us about the author's feelings towards the subject of the poem?
Presumably, many of the words will be met with mixed reactions. After inventory has been taken for each word, choose 3-5 words that students disagreed over. To encourage students to think critically about their own experiences surrounding the subject of the text, ask students to talk with a partner about a word they disagreed on. Frame their discussion with the following statements: "I felt this word had a positive/negative/neutral connotation because I…"
This activity helps students to begin thinking critically about how the author of a poem deliberately chooses vocabulary with the intention of evoking an emotional response. By doing this activity students can have a class centered discussion surrounding the author's tone and the mood that is evoked from simply analyzing the vocabulary in the poem.
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