When it comes to the vocabulary of literary mood, my 8th graders (every year) arrive vocabulary poor. I can only hear about the mood being “happy” or “sad” for so long before I start feeling vocabulary starved! So this year, before I ever asked a student about the mood of a text, I asked them to research, write scripts for, and record short videos about 45 different words that could describe the mood of a story.
Research varies, but all teachers know that students need to hear a word in context LOTS of times before it becomes a word they really know and can use meaningfully. Me giving them a list of “mood words” would never have worked to truly expand their vocabularies, but asking them to look up words, write about what they meant, listen to classmates rehearse, watch classmates film, and then view the final production gave them lots of contextual exposure to the words and seems to have cemented at least a few of the words into their brains.
My evidence? When I had them read “The Little Brother Poem” and write about the mood I got a few “sad”s, but a lot more sorrowful, melancholic, and regretfuls. A feast of new vocabulary!
The script was simple:
The mood is ________________.
When a story has a ________________ mood, the reader feels _______________________.
An author could create this mood by ______________________________.
The mood is ________________.
Here is the video of the top 33 mood words (some didn’t make the cut to the YouTube version). It is about 8 minutes long – probably too long for a stranger to be interested in, but my students were riveted to it since they were watching their classmates.
Lesson Idea graciously cross-posted from Love::Teaching by LAURA COUGHLIN
Photo Credit: Film-Slate from wpclipart.com
Thank you, Laura, for sharing this wonderful and engaging lesson to build vocabulary, and develop the concept of literary mood. I will certainly share this video with my students and courage them to create their own. I hope others also try and share here also. Excellent!
For readers: please visit Laura’s blogs (see Contributors) for more engaging lessons.
Yes, I love this lesson, Laura. Thanks for sharing it. I am planning to do it with my students. I wonder if I will wait until after they make their own videos to show them the Missouri students’ video, though? Or maybe I would just show a few clips, so they wouldn’t be overly-inspired!
What do you two think about that…To show the video or not to show the video?
Thanks, Laura and Sheri!
Denise
Denise- I would show at least 1 to give them a clear idea of what you’re wanting. I made one of myself and showed it before I had them write their scripts and I think it eliminated a lot of questions I might have gotta about minutiae.
Thanks!
Laura
Hi Denise, I think I’d pick out two that demonstrated the final product and show one of them as an introduction. Then, as students get into the project, show another as a reminder and to start discussion on presentation and content, asking “What does your team need to do to meet this standard?” Some kids need a model, some kids need a nudge. By sharing two this way, those kids get what they need, and can match the creativity of those who just fly with projects like this. Great question.