Day 125: Tone in Poetry

Posted on by garvoille

1. Warm-up. Students answered the following questions at the beginning of class:

1.Review: What are a poet’s goals? What are a poet’s techniques?
2.What do you want to learn about poetry?
3.Replace the underlined words to be positive:
–You’re fired!
–She dumped her boyfriend.
4.Rewrite these sentences to be negative:
–Our teacher is energetic.
–She wears only vintage clothes.

2. Share. Students were called on to tell the goals and techniques of poets. Then, we shared our answers to 3 and 4 with our partner, and shared a few answers with the whole class.

3. Examples of Connotation. When do you call someone a genius and when do you call them a brainiac? They mean the same thing, but have different connotations. Students listed words with the same denotation (i.e. smart or dumb) but with different connotations.

4. Connotation ordering. Students received L29: connotation denotation. In groups of 3 or 4, they ordered the words in each box by how positive or negative the connotation. At the bottom, they wrote a biased version of a fake news report from Egypt’s Tahrir Square.

6. Connotation in “This Is Just to Say.” We listened to This American Life’s broadcast on the William Carlos Williams poem here (start at 49:26). To listen, click “Play Episode.”

7. Tone chart. We filled out the tone chart next to the poem.
HW: 7th period – finish L28. Other periods – none.

Published by garvoille