Second Informal: Tone

Got my second informal out of the way today! Once again, I think it went well and I had a lot of fun with it.

To bridge the gap between the poetry we've been analyzing and the drama unit we are about to start, I taught about Tone. We defined tone as a speaker's or writer's attitude toward his or her subject. We also clarified the difference between Tone and Mood- Tone shows the emotions of the speaker, whereas Mood is how we feel when we read and react. I also used a tonal scale worksheet to make sure the students had vocabulary to express the tone.

We also discussed the difference between reading tone and speaking tone. We understand tone and "hear" tone as we read through the descriptive language, punctuation, and figurative language that the author uses. When we perform, we can further convey tone using our voice, facial expressions, and body language.

I had a lot of fun with our first activity. I randomly selected a student using an App called GroupMaker. The student then picked a number, 1-12, which corresponded with a picture of a person or animal whose expression portrays a certain tone. The students then draw a sentence from and must read the sentence in a tone that matches that of the picture. The students loved it!

Next, since we had been working on "Sonnet 130," I used that poem to look at different interpretations of tone. We discussed what Shakespeare intended the tone to be and then compared that to three different performances of the poem.




While the kids listened to the interpretations, they used todaysmeet to contribute what they thought the tone of each version was. Todaysmeet allows all the students to simultaneously contribute to an online forum. As a teacher, I can then make sure everyone is participating AND I can use their comments as a means of formative assessment. With this transcript, we had a class discussion to pin point the tones of each video clip, as well as which clip best matched Shakespeare's tone.

Finally, I had the students write their own sentences conveying tone using descriptive language and figurative language. This, again, was a great formative assessment to help me see if they are grasping the concept.

The lesson went well and I had a lot of fun planning it AND teaching it!