Miss Francis

     During my student teaching and long-term subsititute experience, I was given the task of reviewing information that would be addressed on standardized testing. This information had already been taught to the students and continued to be used, but my task was to review and check for understanding. One of the topics I covered was an author's mood versus his tone in a written work.

     I wanted to make this lesson memorable for my students, since the two are easily and frequently confused. Click on the buttons below to see what I did to teach tone and mood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mood, I think, is always easier to teach because it's each individual person's emotions or feelings towards a given subject. For this, I decided to show that an author can choose the mood in anything: a book, a poem, music, and even a movie. I chose a film that most, if not all, of my students had seen.

        First, I played just the music from my computer and had the students write their emotions on a piece of paper as the song changed (because for this particular song, it changes quite a bit). I did it with the lights off and no talking was allowed so each student could truly concentrate on his/herself during this exerciese. We then discussed how the mood changes, and you can feel what the author is trying to get you to feel, not necessarily how he feels about the topic.

       Then I played the scene for my students on the smart board partly as a treat for participating and also so they can see how their mood matched up with the movie. They noticed that they were happy when they were supposed to be and sad when they were supposed to be. Overall, it turned out to be a good lesson. The scene/music I used is below and it's from the Disney-Pixar movie "Up." I challenge you to play through it and see how your mood changes.