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Cut-and-Paste Not Just for Kindergarteners

Cut-and-Paste Not Just for Kindergarteners
Tammie Cavanaugh, Communicator Contributor

How do you make learning a skill in middle school more enjoyable? An activity of cut-and-paste, of course! Middle school students in language arts classes have been learning how writers choose words to convey tone, which helps tell the story in an interesting way. Being able to identify tone and use different sound devices to develop tone are part of the Mississippi College and Career Readiness Standards for English Language Arts.

How do you make learning a skill in middle school more enjoyable? An activity of cut-and-paste, of course! Middle school students in language arts classes have been learning how writers choose words to convey tone, which helps tell the story in an interesting way. Being able to identify tone and use different sound devices to develop tone are part of the Mississippi College and Career Readiness Standards for English Language Arts.

Eighth-grade teacher Mrs. Harville shared how she worked with her classes identifying tone through a cut-and-paste activity. “I provided students with an excerpt from a story that was rich with opportunities for identifying tone,” she explained. “Different sentences were culled, and phrases were underlined for students to match the tone of the text to a word in a vocabulary list that conveyed that tone.”

Mrs. Harville reviewed the vocabulary words from the activity and read the paragraphs in the excerpt. Using a Kagan Cooperative Learning Structure called RallyCoach, she had students talk in their small groups about what the excerpt was mostly about, and then again as a class. Groups worked with partners to alternate matching a quote from the excerpt with a vocabulary word that conveyed the tone of the underlined phrase.

To complete the activity, Mrs. Harville modeled writing an impact statement that explained how the word choice impacted the meaning of the text, then had partners alternate writing their own impact statements using the RallyCoach Structure. The cut-and-paste activity with the Kagan Structure RallyCoach increased student engagement through hands-on interaction, discussion, and collaboration with peers. Students deepened their understanding of tone and the impact that word choice has on what we read.