Middle school poetry

here

and

here

characterization

here for flash cards basic

here more advanced

myers-briggs here

here to help build your story

find some videos

Literary Devices

here

look here too

writing stories videos

All brilliant, from http://worldbookday.com/


structure

descriptive writing

planning

character development

mystery and suspense

lit 2015

here

Elma Mitchell

Elma Mitchell portrays people as easy things to describe, as long as the intellect is not involved. In the first stanzas, she makes use of the senses: touch, taste, smell, sight. The sense of hearing is left aside because it inevitably involves the intellect.

Throughout the poem, she builds up the notion that people could be easily defined, like in a dictionary or an encyclopedia. She uses the structure of the poem to emphasise that: things are listed as mere information about people, unlike what is generally seen in a poem. The poem is mainly seen as impersonal and informative.

Although this poem seeks to define people through the senses, in the last stanza the persona fails to analyse people through the sense of hearing because the intellect is not reliable since then we judge and come up with misleading conclusions. She criticises the judgement human beings usually pass, unless their intellect is not involved. She also points out the activity of drawing as an effective way of defining people.

To conclude, the writer seeks to effectively describe people, pointing out that hearing – and consequently writing – aren´t suitable, so she creates an ironic situation since she is a poet writing this poem in order to describe people.

podcasts

Podcasts

On a foggy fall day, I took my ninth graders outside to sit on the porch while I read "The Tell-Tale Heart," tapping heartbeats on the deck and playing off the ominous weather. They hung on every word, engrossed in Edgar Allen Poe.

Leveraging the recording capabilities of most computers and mobile devices, students could explore the role of tone and sound by creating podcasts in the fashion of old-school radio shows. Using Garageband, Audacity, AudioBoo or any other sound recorder, students can retell portions of stories, complete with background music and sound effects, to demonstrate their understanding of tone, setting and theme, as well as practice their reading fluency.