Mood and Tone
A Free Unit For Grades 5-6
Mood and tone can be really tough concepts to teach. As adults, we might understand the concept of the mood of a story vs the author's tone, but for kids, it's a big concept to master. In this unit, your students will walk step-by-step through descriptions, exercises, and activities to help them discover what these two big concepts mean, and how they're different.
First, you'll use the posters/slides to teach your learners what mood and tone are. You'll discuss words that can be used to describe them, how authors use them, and how to describe the difference between them. The slides can basically be used as a teaching script and include discussion prompts to help you along.
After reading about what mood and tone are, you'll either choose an excerpt for students to use in class, or let your students choose one themselves. I have included 5 really fantastic excerpts from great books that will give quite a lot to work with. Some are shorter and some are longer, but all show the mood and tone of those books quite well.
Students will use these excerpts to write a paragraph about the mood and tone given in that excerpt using a guided writing exercise.
These tough concepts are broken down step-by-step here for your kids to write a full paragraph about the mood and tone of their chosen excerpt. If you're reading a novel in class, you may wish to discuss that novel first and the mood and tone they see there.
Students will choose an adjective to describe the mood and tone of the excerpt (examples are given to inspire them - I highly recommend letting them use a thesaurus too!). They'll then need to find 3 examples from the excerpt that prove this adjective describes the mood or tone of the text.
Finally, they'll put everything together into a final paragraph. This is a great way to prepare for writing a literary essay, and the posters and worksheets can be used throughout the year to practice the concept.
Download the Free Unit Below
You can download this free unit by clicking on the link below. **You may use and distribute this product for FREE in your homeschool, classroom, or school, but you MUST leave my website name as it is on each page (MessyBeautifulFun.com). If you'd like to share the digital file directly, please direct people to this blog page and not the Google Drive link. You may NOT sell this unit or redistribute it for a profit. Thanks!**
