One of the specific text preparation objectives for my county / state is to identify the tone of a piece of writing. It is one of the more difficult concepts for my students, so I created this power point lesson to help the students review it. Slide two presents a reading passage with a typical standardized test question (answer included). I explain to the students that what makes this concept so difficult is that you must analyze the writing in order to determine the best answer. To do so, you really must think about it. So, the review lesson focuses on having the students first take notes on tone including the literary definition, characteristics, common tone words, and quotes about tone from authors (slide three) and then apply the concept to a piece of writing.
Slides 4-6 provide a model using Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. At the time of the review my students were reading the Diary of Anne Frank, so their re-reading assignment was from this text (slide 7) and it is followed by selected responses from the class (slides 8-11). You will likely want to revise these last slides to use a different text, but I left them in so you could see the full trajectory of the lesson. If I were to use this again, I would finish it by having the students write test questions using an excerpt from the text and use those for a whole class review.

The preview allows you to view a JPEG of the power point.

















tone, literature, power point, test review, test prep, test preparation, literary tone