Teachers know that themes are not clinical, some kind of chip inserted just beneath the skin of the story by the author. While reading, he created this Plutchik wheel, then wrote the poem to trace Isabel’s emotional journey:īut how might these observations enhance a student’s essay about theme? chose to follow Josef and Isabel through Refugee by Alan Gratz. She chose to base her four-stanza poem on her observations about Finch. (Spoiler alert: If this book is on your TBR list, only read the first two stanzas!) read All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven and followed Finch and Violet’s emotions through the story. Here is her Plutchik wheel: Each point labeled on the wheel became its own stanza in the poem.Īva R. the writing.Īfter students recorded their observations on the Plutchik wheel, they wrote a poem in four stanzas, capturing the changes in one of the characters they followed and providing slightly more context for that character’s emotional journey. In a lower-tech setting, I would have given each student a photocopied image of the Plutchik wheel to color and tape in their Writer’s Notebook to keep these records.īut let’s get back to the good stuff. I am in a 1:1 Microsoft building, so my students logged these brief observations on a personal OneNote page. Explain in a quick annotation what circumstances have led each character to experience the emotion. Four times during the course of the plot, pinpoint the emotional state of each of these characters on this wheel. Instead of haunting them with reminders of an impending “major theme essay assignment” the whole time they read their books, I gave them this challenge: Pick two characters to follow through the book. Returning home from NCTE to my students and their independent reading books, I changed my traditional approach to a curriculum-required writing assignment. Here is a link to that tweet, and here is a clearer image of what I soon learned is called Plutchik’s wheel of emotions: Image via It featured a graphic from a session I was not able to attend where, coincidentally, A. King at her NCTE 2019 book signing, I scrolled through my Twitter feed and stumbled upon an intriguing tweet. Prewriting with poetry can give literary analysis essays a pulse. Crafting poetry can also help students dig deeper into details they later incorporate in the heart of their writing. In last month’s post on Moving Writers, I shared how some simple poetry writing helped students tease out a theme in their reading.
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