Week 4: Choose one of the poems read on YouTube by Edna St. Vincent Millay herself. After listening to the poem, read the poem out loud to yourself. Does listening to the poem first help you get a better understanding of the meaning? Choose a stanza to read aloud on Friday at our meeting. (I previewed and chose ahead of time several of the poems by Millay and had them on my playlist.)
Week 5: Choose a poem and print it out. Using a highlighter, mark any strong words or images in the poem. (Look up any unfamiliar words.) Be ready to discuss on Friday how you think the word choices set the mood of the poem.
I gave him the following definitions:
Tone in literature tells us how the author thinks about his or her subject. The author's style conveys the tone in literature. Tone is the author's attitude toward story and readers.I gave him this link that lists words he can use in his explanation: Tone and Mood List
Mood is the effect of the writer's words on the reader. Mood is how the writer’s words make us feel.
Week 6: Complete your study by finishing your author's biography notebook page. Choose one final poem to copy into your notebook. Be prepared to share both the notebook page and the poem at Friday's meeting.
5 comments:
I was just contemplating this weekend how I would handle poetry if I ever decide to go sans a curriculum for literature. I forgot about your poetry post! Thanks for posting another--this is VERY helpful.
I am glad that you are finding the posts helpful. We have always enjoyed reading and memorizing poetry but giving my son a little assignment each week seems to help him get more out of the reading. Like I said in my first post in this series, my boys like to have some sort of reason for reading poetry and breaking it up into pieces. Plus it gives us a time to reinforce all those great literary terms we have learned through the years. :)
Thanks for sharing the poetry update. I keep finding there is more and more to learn from poetry . . . so we seem to be using it more and more in our hodge-podge curriculum and I always appreciate great ideas! I'll be checking out youtube for Edna St. Vincent Millay in just a minute. . . .
Tatiana
Yes, very helpful. I like that this is simple (not easy, mind you, but simple) but deep. Great questions! Did you spend a lot of time working on them?
Jimmie,
The ideas for the assignments sort of come one week at a time to me by watching and listening to the previous week. I am trying to let the study unfold in a way that is meaningful to my son.
So it actually is not taking a lot of time to pull the ideas together.
The idea for the tone/mood assignment came from a comment he made one week about how he could pick a Edna St. Vincent Millay poem out from a group if he had too. I asked why he thought so and he said it was because of the way the poems made him feel. I jumped on that and found the info on tone/mood and then built the assignment from there.
The listening to the poet on YouTube assignment came from starting his research on Millay and finding that there were actual audio files of her reading the poems.
I am more or less following his lead from week to week.
This week we are starting Robert Browning and it should be interesting to see how he shapes this study. :)
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