The beauty of English Language Arts is that it is recursive and the same concepts are explored from year to year, just at varying depths. So today, we touched upon literary devices, which the students learned in seventh grade. While there are a lot of literary devices to explore, today we touched upon the following:
- alliteration and assonance
- metaphors and similes
- flashback and foreshadowing
- personification
- onomatopoeia
First, we did a quick pre-assessment so I could see who knew what general concepts. We used my new favorite classroom toy, Plickers. These “picture clickers” combine an app with cards that are specially-coded and can be assigned to students. They turn the cards in order to answer with an “A,” “B,” “C,” or “D.” Below is a (very roughly-done) screencast I did for one of my grad classes on the usefulness of Plickers.
Hopefully one day I will have enough time to re-do this video to make it better. 🙂
We then watched some videos to help illustrate the various literary devices. Two of the best-loved videos were a rap about literary devices
and examples of literary devices in pop culture.
We then finished class by re-taking the Plickers pre-assessment so that I could see if the students had any better results. In most cases, all of the students answered correctly. There were only a handful of students (under 5) in each class that were unclear about the meaning of some of the literary devices.
Homework:
- Read for 30 minutes.
- Continue working on Genius Hour Project.
- Study vocabulary in preparation for the quiz on Friday.
PowerPoint:
