September
6
ELA 10: Sept 6 Poetry appreciation and discussion…
- We’ve looked at a few stories and poems about mysterious things. Now, we’ll have a short little pool of poems to read together and analyze a bit more critically.
- Students were given a handout regarding the steps to reading poetry and some of the common questions to consider when analyzing it.
- Next, I read for them aloud a poem titled “Frankenstein” and they had to listen carefully to the story. Just before the
end of the poem, at the climax of it, I asked students to predict the ending of the poem. We finished it and they wrote down their initial reaction on a question sheet provided. We discussed the rest of the questions, such as the tone or speaker, together as a group. The class did a great job of looking for figurative language in the poem and found some cleverly hidden ones. Good work! - We read another short poem, just for interest sake, written by J.R.R. Tolken titled Poems that was written as a riddle and, without the title to really clue the reader in, it may have been quite impossible to actually answer the riddle. It was a fun discussion.
- We will continue with a few more poems but students were informed and reminded that their next assignment (highlighted on their resource list) is to orally present a poem. They are to find a poem of at least 15 lines in length that fits into our theme of “The Unknown” (we identified the sub-units to give more ideas of the types of genres that would be fitting), memorize it and present it dramatically for the class, using whatever props they can think to use, such as costume, a darkened room, music in the background or other such things. They will present their poems next Monday or Tuesday; we’ll see how tomorrow’s class goes to determine the due date.