Do Now: THINK/SHARE
What if life had a RESET button?
Based on your understanding of the aforementioned, share a time when you did or said something that you regret, and explain why you felt that way.
For the do now, Mrs. Peterson asked the class to explain some things that they regret doing in their life. The thing that I said I regret doing was joining my school’s baseball team when I no longer enjoyed baseball. If I just thought of my choices more, I wouldn’t be in the situation I'm in now where I go to every game and practice thinking “Why did I do this?” As a result of this mistake I made, I make sure I try to make decisions in the future that are well thought out and at some point in time I don't end up regretting them. I wasn’t the only student in the class to regret a decision they made in life. One of my classmates' responses was Christophers who said that he rode his bike in the park after a big snowstorm, then after a couple days he realized that his bike got rusted from all the salt that was in the roads which then led to him ruining his bike.
Connotation and Denotation
Next, the class used the spirit reading technique to learn about connotation and denotation. Connotation is the ideas or feelings that a word invokes while denotation is the literal or primary meaning of a word. Both of these techniques are very crucial to a writer's work because they help the reader understand the writing to a deeper level and they invoke certain feelings in the reader with different connotations. The example Mrs. Peterson provided to the class was “The Ocean.” She said the denotation of “The Ocean” is “A large body of salt water that covers approximately 70% of the earth’s surface. Appears different shades of blue, often with waves and currents. Contains various types of plant and marine animal life.” This is the denotation because it is the exact definition of what the ocean is. Mrs. Peterson said the connotation is “Peace, tranquility, expansiveness, the unknown, the power of nature, etc.” Those words are the connotation because they are words that correlate to “The Ocean” and they evoke feelings of calmness in the reader.
After going over the definition of connotation and denotation we watched a short three minute video that provided examples of both techniques(link to video DENOTATIONS & CONNOTATIONS | English Lesson - YouTube). Some examples that were mentioned in the video are the words curious and nosy. These two words have the same dictionary definition or denotation, but they have different connotations. The word curious has a more positive connotation while nosy is more negative. A couple other examples mentioned in the video are aroma vs. stench and mob vs. crowd.
Breakout Rooms/Groupwork
In the breakout rooms each group then proceeded to answer four questions about connotations and denotations, and how you can fix a sentence to change them.
Consider the following sentence from Speak:
“I dive into the stream of fourth-period lunch students and swim down the hall to the cafeteria.”
1.What connotations do the images of diving into and swimming through other students have here?
The connotation of this sentence is negative because it implies that there are a lot of students and they have to force their way through the group of people.
2.Now rewrite the sentence, trying to keep the same denotative meaning but changing the connotations to make them neutral.
I walk into the crowd of fourth period lunch and make my way down the hall to the cafeteria.
3.Now consider what is conveyed by Anderson’s diction (particularly the verbs) in this sentence.
“I ditch my tray and bolt for the door.”
Based on the verbs, what inferences might you draw about the speaker’s feelings at this moment?
The speaker is probably embarrassed and humiliated, I could tell this because of the verbs ditch and bolt. They both have negative connotations because they are very sudden and quick movements that you don’t use unless you are scared or embarrassed.
4.Now revise Anderson’s sentence to be more neutral.
I place my tray down and walk for the door.
After the groups were done with the questions everyone went back to the main room and we discussed and analyzed our answers for the questions and went over our next activity which was annotating a small portion of the text “Marigolds.”
This is what I annotated for the text “Marigolds”.
Homework
The final thing we did before the end of class was go over the homework due before next cycle. The homework was to finish annotating the rest of the story “Marigolds.”
Reflection
This lesson was a very interesting and important lesson for me. I learned about connotation and denotation, which I never knew of before this lesson. Learning about these two techniques will greatly help me in the future to advance my writing to the next level. Now I could appeal more to readers' needs with the use of these two techniques by broadening my vocabulary. Furthermore, this lesson helped me with getting to know my groupmates better, working better as a team, and working on my annotation skills. The more me and my group work together in breakout rooms, the better our quality of work, and teamwork will be. Lastly, I learned that I could comment on different word documents to help myself better annotate, which is a feature I will most definitely use in the future.
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