Tone might be one of the hardest concepts to explain to students. Some understand tone immediately. These are not the students to worry about. Our job as teachers is to help those who do not innately understand how to analyze literature. This blog post will help you out with how to teach tone to your students!
Working out how to understand tone in the classroom can help students understand it better when reading at home. Working it out at school can allow them to feel more confident while reading and analyzing on their own. Here are three ways to work on analyzing tone in the classroom that will help you with how to teach tone.
How to Teach Tone: Here are 3 Ways Students Can Analyze Tone
1. Use a word list
Words that express a happy connotation or a sad connotation are simple enough for the students to recognize. Once they can identify these kinds of words, discussing more complex tones like sarcasm, bitterness, or even apathy will be easier to tackle in the classroom. Use this list of keywords to ensure that the students understand the importance of word choice and sentence structure. Providing them with a list of essential words that they can look for while reading any novel or short story will get them used to looking for the words in general and will help their skills in identifying different tones
2. Read out loud
You can do this with the actual novel you are reading, or you can also use other short story examples. Short stories no more than a few pages will have a tone that you can easily discuss in class. Children’s stories are also an excellent example to use in the classroom because they often will have a simple, easy to identify tone. Again, these stories can be read out loud to give the students a better sense of the tone of the story.
3. Act it out
There is a reason we always read Shakespeare out loud: so the students can understand how the characters are interacting and how their moods change during the scene. The same concept applies to analyzing tone in literature: novels, short stories, and plays alike. By having the students act out the scene, they can get a much more well-rounded feeling of the tone as a whole. This takes the “reading out loud” argument to another level. By utilizing this method of teaching, you can bring the literature to life and help the students see the work as something worth considering in a broader context.
The main point is just getting enough practice to make the students feel comfortable with identifying tone. Any of these methods will get them into the habit of looking for and understanding the tone of any piece of literature you want them to work with.
How to Teach Tone: Classroom Lesson and Teaching Resource
If you are looking for a resource to help you with how to teach tone in your ELA classroom, I’ve got you covered! Help your students master the concept of tone with this comprehensive Elements of Literature Mini-Unit. Designed to engage middle and high school students, this ready-to-use resource simplifies the teaching of tone in any fiction text.
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16-slide PowerPoint presentation
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Student sketch notes for note taking during instruction
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Tone scavenger hunt for any text
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12 tone tasks cards for any text
Perfect for English Language Arts and English classes, this resource makes it easy to teach tone through engaging and flexible materials. All student materials are provided as a secured PDF for easy classroom use.
This tone mini-unit is ideal for helping students identify and analyze tone in literature, while building critical reading skills.
TEACHERS LIKE YOU SAY…
“Excellent resource that kept my students engaged and taught them how to identify tone in their reading and also add it to their writing. Instructions are clear and the unit was easy to implement and use with my class. Thank you!”
“This was a great activity. I was able to purchase and use the next with very little prep. It worked well with the story we were reading.”
