Personification in Poetry

 Today's Learning Objectives   To understand and appreciate poetry and identify and understand personification. 

Warm-Up: Work on 100 Word Challenge Story  Let's begin today by taking some time to work on our 100 Word Challenge: Remember writing pieces, which are to be published tomorrow. Please pay close attention to your spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and verb tenses (more to come later today about this).   

Personification in Poetry  We are going to continue our exploration of poetry today by examining the use of personification in two different poems. For a reminder on what personification is and why poets use it, check out the infographic below. 

As you read today's poems, be on the lookout for personification, as the poets work to give human qualities to things that are decidedly non-human. Record your analysis of personification using the document Personification in Poetry, which can be found in your Language Arts folders. 

City Jungle by Pie Corbett from digital:works on Vimeo.

Writing Mini-Lesson: Verb Tenses  When you write a narrative, a general rule of thumb is to use one consistent verb tense. For example, if you begin telling a story using the past tense, you should maintain the past tense throughout your story. What you don't want to do is shift from one tense to another without clear reasoning. For example, you don't want to start telling a story in the past tense, shift to the present, and then back to the past again. However, several of you have received comments from your international writing mentors asking you to take a look at your use of inconsistent verb tenses. 

Here's a sampling: 

Notice that each of the student writers addressed above received positive feedback but had similar issues with their verb tenses. Now let's take a look at a few writing samples from these students and see if we can help them make their use of verb tenses more consistent. 

Discuss with your teammates: What simple changes in verb tenses could we make in each story to make them more effective? Also, have a conversation about why it's important to use consistent verb tenses when telling a story. Be prepared to share out. 

(1.) Read your A.R. book at home for at least 30 minutes and make a Digital Reading Log entry. (2.) We will be publishing our 100 Word Challenge: Remember stories tomorrow, Friday, 14. (3.) Tomorrow is Friday, so several assignments from the past week are due, including: Similes and Metaphors in Poetry and Sound Devices in Poetry.