Blogger #11 - Emily Liu - Period #1 - 3/3/2021 - Day A

Aim: How does a writer create effects through the connotations of words and images?




Today’s Lesson




Do Now- Think/Share




Share a time when you did or said something that you regret, and explain why you felt that way.




I found this do now to be very relevant to the class topic because it was a perfect example of negative connotations and denotations. For example, words like “regret” created feelings of embarrassment and shame




CONNOTATION and DENOTATION




Denotation: The literal or primary meaning of a word




Connotation: The ideas or feelings that a word invokes





The class watched a video about denotations and connotations and were able to answer questions to earn team points. The questions provided a sentence or phrase which students had to decide had negative or positive connotations based on context clues.

Link- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz9V1FfC6bA&ab_channel=KevinSpaans 

After watching the rest of the video, students went into their teams to discuss the connotations of phrases from an excerpt from “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson. After determining what connotation the sentences had, we then had to rewrite them to be more neutral. The sentences we had to analyze were:

1. “I dive into the stream of fourth-period lunch students and swim down the hall to the cafeteria.”

• My team believed that this sentence had negative connotations because words like “stream” and “swim” indicate the feeling of being in a pool or the ocean and feeling drowned and suffocate.
• I enter the group of fourth period lunch students and walk down the hall to the cafeteria.

1. “I ditch my tray and bolt for the door.”

• My team believed that this phrase had a negative connotation because words like “ditch” and “bolt” indicate that the speaker wants to leave the situation as soon as possible.
• I put down my tray and walked out the door.

After coming back together and discussing our results as a whole class, we moved on to the text “Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier. The task was to annotate the text by highlighting and leaving comments on sentences or phrases that had positive or negative connotations and analyzing what those phrases showed about the theme and plot of the text and what they showed about the speaker.




Here is an example of annotated text using my annotations on “Marigolds”.






The HW for this cycle was to annotate the rest of “Marigolds”.




Reflection




This lesson really helped me learn new ways to analyze texts and stories. Denotations are the literal meaning of the word and connotations dig deeper and find the meaning and feeling behind the word. These techniques can help me easier understand the tone and mood of the text and discover themes and the feelings of the speaker.