At SOTA I carried out a lesson with the Sec 2s to teach narrative tone. The text that they are doing is Island Voices, and I wanted them to pay closer attention to the way the narrative voice shapes our impressions of characters and objects in the story.
Basically, dividing the class into groups, I assigned them a series of important scenes involving dialogue in the story. With a series of scaffolding questions written on the board, I directed them to discuss, in their groups, previously explored ideas of characterization, context, and literary devices to help think specifically about how the narrator and each of the characters would say their lines. Finally, each member in the group would assigned a specific character, and they would read the scene out to the class. I decided on simply reading, instead of acting, because the focus was on tone.
The kids enjoyed this a lot, although, as one would expect, there were a few who were more withdrawn. I tried to correct this by distributing and assigning the more energetic and vocal kids in each group to narrate the particularly pertinent roles involving tone. Nevertheless, the acting generated a lot of authentic responses which served to impress on them the effect of the narrative tone. For example, in one scene a man is crying, but he is described as having "Yellow-streaked saliva" dripping from his mouth as the narrator said these lines , the kids accurately cringed at this despite the pitiful subject material. These authentic responses allowed them to accurately analyze and identify how tone influences our impressions of characters, and allowed me to tap onto their responses to teach how things like word choice create a tone that deliberately influence our impressions of characters.
:)
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