Aim: How can active reading be applied to interpret writers’ choices that create a narrative voice?
Do Now: (Class Discussion) What does it mean to you when you hear the phrase: “to come of age”?
For this class discussion, some students took the phrase literally, while some took it metaphorically. “To come of age” means when a person has reached adulthood and gained maturity. It could also mean that a character has experienced a multitude of events and from each event they gain knowledge and experience. It’s what builds character and instills maturity in the person, and allows for the person to understand more of what's around them.
Double Entry Journal
A double-entry journal is a note taking strategy when actively reading a text. It’s called a double entry journal since there are two entries where one is the text and one is the reader’s analysis. In the journal, you can connect your experiences, share your thoughts, and comment on the characters in the text.
After discussing what the phrase “to come of age” meant and reviewing what a double entry journal is, we did “Spirit Reading.” Spirit Reading is a session where students read a part of the lesson. Students are allowed to unmute and read a section of the text until they want to stop which is when the next student would just continue the reading. For this Spirit Reading, we read an excerpt from Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. But before the spirit reading, we watched a short video called Narrative Voices to learn more about narrative voices such as first person, second person, and third person narration.
During the reading, we were supposed to highlight quotes that made us think and connect to the character. As well as paying attention to diction, imagery, and syntax.
Think/Pair/Share Breakout Rooms
After Spirit Reading, we were separated into breakout rooms with our team for 20 minutes to work on our double entry journal for the quotes from the excerpt from Speak. We had to choose 4 quotes from our highlighted quotes, making sure that there were a variety of quotes, and then reacting to the quotes. After finishing our own journal, we exchanged with someone in our group for your groupmates to comment on your quotes to see if we saw the quote the same way or differently.
Ms. Peterson introduced us to the word “Ohana'' (Hawaiian) which means family and “family means no one gets left behind or forgotten.” Not every group had an even number of members which was why we had to find a way to include everyone. Some solutions suggested where everyone swap their work, two people trade and the rest find a way to share between them. For my group, two of my groupmates swapped their work and the rest of us swapped our works clockwise.
My partner added his comments to my quotes and added his reactions to the quotes. One of my quotes was “Thwap! A lump of potatoes and gravy hits me square in the center of my chest. All conversation stops as the entire lunchroom gawks, my face burning into their retinas.” I said that the sound “thawp” can be used to visualize as the potato hits the narrator. From the quote, we can visualize that the narrator is standing in the lunchroom with potato on her and full of embarrassment. My partner said “The choice to use an onomatopoeia in this instance brings the sentence to life. It pulls the reader into the science, forcing the reader to relate to the feeling of being shunned for something they can’t control.” Overall my partner and I had relatively similar reactions to the quotes.
Individual Activity
After we came back as a class to the main room, we were assignment an activity to answer the following questions:
To explore how, choose three “quotes” you think sound particularly authentic to a teen’s voice and respond to the follow “2” bullets:
Does Melinda’s sarcastic interior monologue seem authentic? Why or why not?
What inferences can students draw based on her voice? From her voicelessness?
We ended the lesson of “Speak” and Narrative Voices with a discussion of the individual activity that we had to answer. We discussed the ways Anderson used to capture the voice of a teenager in her story.
Reflection
In today’s lesson, I learned about the concept of how writer’s choices create narrative voice in the text and this was shown in the excerpt from Speak where Anderson was able to capture the voice of a teenager in her story. I also learned how we can use diction, syntax, and imagery to create narrative voices. An example of these techniques used in Speak is imagery which is shown in this quote: “The hot lunch is turkey with reconstituted dried mashed potatoes and gravy, a damp green vegetable, and a cookie.” Imagery doesn’t always have to make the reader visualize the thing that the narrator/author is describing. Sometimes it can just make the reader want to experience the thing and connect to what the narrator is describing. In this case, I visualize the school lunch and compare it to how my school lunches are like. The description really fits how school lunches are like. I learned about narrative voice because narrative voice is an important part of storytelling and can have an important effect on the story and the reader’s response. It also determines the character with whom the audience will sympathize with and shapes the understanding of the story’s events. I can apply what I’ve learned from this lesson in the future to my writing or storytelling to create a narrative voice. Using diction, syntax, and imagery to create a voice that I want to recapture or create just like how Anderson was able to capture the voice of a teenager when she wrote the book when she was an adult. Also to make sure that my writing fits in and is appropriate with the audience.
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