Cue—Do—Review for Gothic
tone elements with “The Black Cat”
1. When introducing a new unit in literature, I typically ask students what they already know about a particular genre or time frame. For Gothic literature, they have plenty to say about horror and suspense movies.
For extra work with tone, I show video clips of movie trailers set in different tones (Harry Potter as a teen comedy, etc.)
2. To introduce “The Black Cat,” we focused on vocabulary words with strong connotations of mystery, psychological imbalance, and shocking behavior/reactions. Students were then able to build a word bank to assist with understanding of Poe’s complex language.
They work with context clues to suggest definitions for some of the words on the list.
3. After reading the story, we listed the events to analyze Poe’s structure of suspense and ironic outcome for the narrator. We matched the vocabulary words as evidence of his tone.
Tone is then the link I focus on for the Concept Diagram.
1. When introducing a new unit in literature, I typically ask students what they already know about a particular genre or time frame. For Gothic literature, they have plenty to say about horror and suspense movies.
For extra work with tone, I show video clips of movie trailers set in different tones (Harry Potter as a teen comedy, etc.)
2. To introduce “The Black Cat,” we focused on vocabulary words with strong connotations of mystery, psychological imbalance, and shocking behavior/reactions. Students were then able to build a word bank to assist with understanding of Poe’s complex language.
They work with context clues to suggest definitions for some of the words on the list.
3. After reading the story, we listed the events to analyze Poe’s structure of suspense and ironic outcome for the narrator. We matched the vocabulary words as evidence of his tone.
Tone is then the link I focus on for the Concept Diagram.