Some poems are written as Choral poems, meant to be read aloud but in groups to really explore the rhythm and rhyme of the wording. For this poem activity, you and your partner will practice reading the poem out together with exaggeration to develop the rhythm and then you’ll record and publish a Fotobabble of your poetry reading/speaking.
You can publish the Fotobabble to
both your blogs under the A2 section label
and post a Link to your Fotobabble as a comment to this post.
“Silver”
Walter de la Mare
Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees,
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and a silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.
It’s challenging enough to try to understand some poems when their lines are in order, but in this activity you’ll try to understand the background of a poem when the lines are switched out of order and put in alphabetical order.
With the poem lines below, study them to:
look closer at the word choices, not the message, and make judgements about the
tone of the poem
topic the poem may be about
characteristics of the author’s word choice – repeated phrases, unusual word choices/pairing
predict what lines may connect with each other to try to piece the poem back into order – what’s the topic?
what other observations can you make of the lines of the poem out of order?
After studying the poem together with a partner and discussing what you can infer from the line order, leave a comment below to explain what conclusions you came up with.
(title not included for now)
Above the Traveller’s head:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
And how the silence surged softly backward,
And the sound of iron on stone,
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
But no one descended to the Traveller;
But only a host of phantom listeners
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
From the one man left awake:
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
Is there anybody there? he said.
Is there anybody there? said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Louder, and lifted his head:
Neath the starred and leafy sky;
Never the least stir made the listeners,
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That dwelt in the lone house then
That goes down to the empty hall,
That I kept my word, he said.
Their stillness answering his cry,
Though every word he spake
To that voice from the world of men:
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
Where he stood perplexed and still.
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
There are a lot of stages of writing a formal type of essay like this and not everyone is going to need help on the same elements. Rather than handout a whole wack of handouts to you, I’m making them all available to you digitally; you can use the ones if/when you need help with that part of the writing process.
To help you understand which ones will be useful to you, I’m providing an image of the handouts. Sometimes, you know what the handout you want looks like, but aren’t sure which to open in the Folder shared with you through OneDrive. The file titles won’t always be so clear to tell.
On your iPads, I realized you can open the ones in Word doc format in Safari and click on the Comments. It will then open on the right-hand side and you’ll be able to click each comment and see its correlating phrase highlighted on the page to understand what explanation is given for each.
You can open the handout from OneDrive by clicking on the hyperlink below each image.
Coming up to your Eye Witness account of an event assignment, you’ll be learning to “show, not tell” some of the details in your narrative. This young girl does a really good job of explaining with examples to help you understand the difference between “tell” and “show”.
Hey 10s,
Several of you are heading away and missing school on Friday and Monday for an awesome ski adventure in Fernie, BC. Unfortunately, it’s not without a little homework!
The easiest homework I can assign, though, is to watch an interesting film. The first option is called The Cove about the cruel treatment/slaughter of dolphins to feed the marine entertainment industry. The second documentary, Blackfish, is about exposing the habitat and dangers of marine life in entertaining aquariums like Sea World. If you have another documentary in mind ask me about it and you might be able to use it.
Note: I’ve added another alternative documentary, for more choice. It is called The Disappearing Male and is about the falling testosterone levels around the world that are thought to be the harmful result of the chemicals in all the products around us. There are fewer males being born in the world; what might this lead to? (See embedded video below)
Purpose to consider before viewing:
You will later be creating a multimedia personal response to the documentary of your choice. For now, your homework is to have watched a documentary that’s suitable for the assignment. You should also take note of some specific parts or points of the film that stand out and cause a reaction from you.
You could use an outline like the one below. Be sure to have copied out a minimum of 5 points and 5 reactions.
Event / Comment from film: My initial reaction:
1. 1.
2. 2.
3. 3.
4. 4.
5. 5.
The Cove documentary
Blackfish – this documentary is available on Netflix if you have access to that.
Welcome back from the Winter Break! I hope everyone had a great time away with their family and friends. It’s always a bit rough trying to jump back into school, so for today’s double class we have a movie to watch. It is part of the Quest category of stories, but before watching you need to clarify what that means.
We’re about to begin reading a novel for our A10 class and it’s a doozy – you’ll enjoy it, I promise! But it’s not just about the writing itself that can influence your experience of this novel. We can have a little fun with it while we read along. That’s what this video is for…
One thing that’s so great about this author’s writing is their development of chapter endings. They always leave you hanging! Wanting more! Unsatisfied! There’s tension! One of the other classes I read this novel with was getting really involved in this book, but when we got to the chapter end we collectively would quietly chant the little medley you’ll find in this video. It’s not mandatory, but I think a few of you will get into it and hum along a bit. We’ll see if you’re up for it. Anyway… watch the video and listen for the medley.
Your next assignment is to “perform” a poem. I put that in quotations because I want to emphasize this point; you’re not just reading it, but you have to include emotion and power through your voice. This isn’t easily done and it will certainly take you outside your comfort zone.
As an example of the type of emotion and voice range you can/should attempt to develop in your poetry performance, listen to this video below focusing on the narrator’s use of voice. This copy here is for those of you who want to watch it as well.
Listening to poems performed: this website has many samples of people performing poetry to give examples of the rhythm, the emotion, the plays on sounds of words, the soft and loud, etc. You could listen to some as inspiration before your own recorded performance.
PoemHunter.com – many poems here of different topics so search through
If you’re stuck and looking for some options for poems to select from, here are a random selection that suit the assignment: Note: I want you to avoid selecting a poem that has an audio recording with it of someone performing it. You need to decide and plan for yourself your interpretation of how this poem should be performed: the mood, the slow and fast parts, the emphasis on certain words or word sounds, etc.
