Fire and Ice

Summary

This lesson is intended to expose English Language Learners (ELL's) to the language of poetry, allowing them to relate words, images, and ideas to their own lives. The Fire and Ice PowerPoint presentation is intended to make the poem, Fire and Ice, more comprehensible to ELL's by providing linguistic, oratory, and visual prompts through out the piece. Also, by having these three mediums combined into one presentation, much of the time spent reading to students, showing them pictures, and pointing to words is saved so that the teacher can walk around and aide any students that may be in need.

Materials

-Computer with MS PowerPoint and projector

-Fire and Ice PowerPoint Presentation

-Fire and Ice Hand-out

-OHT and Markers

-Reading Journals

Background for Teachers

This lesson is designed for an intermediate secondary ESL classroom.

Student Prior Knowledge

Students have high communicative language skills, but are still learning the conventions of standard written English.

Intended Learning Outcomes

1. To use the multimedia PowerPoint presentation as a comprehension tool for the poem, Fire and Ice.

2. To compare the words "fire" and "ice" with emotions (adjectives) on a venn diagram worksheet.

3. To make connections between their lives and the emotions Frost speaks of in his poem, Fire and Ice, writing one paragraph of at least five complete sentences in their reading journals.

Instructional Procedures

1. Ask the students what they think of when they think of hate, desire, the end of the world. Write these down in three columns on the chalkboard or on an overhead.

2. Introduce students to Robert Frost by pointing to New England on a large map of North America, explain that he wrote poetry concerning nature and humanity.

3. Run the Fire and Ice PowerPoint presentation two times for the whole class. Afterward, ask students for their immediate impressions about the relationships between the poem and the pictures included in the presentation.

4. Break students into groups of four or five and hand out "Fire and Ice" worksheet.

5. Have students fill in the venn diagram with the emotions they associate with the words contained in the circles. Have students work on this for fifteen minutes in their groups. During this time the final slide of the presentation should be left up so that all students can view the poem in its entirety.

6. Have students share the emotions they have written down and have them explain why they believe that emotion corresponds to that word. Students should feel free to add to their worksheets. This shouldn't go on for longer than ten minutes.

7. During the final ten minutes of class, have each student choose one emotion from their worksheet and write a paragraph of at least five complete sentences in their reading journal about a time when he or she experienced that emotion. At the end the students should also come up with a different noun that represents their experience of that emotion.

Extensions

Assessment Plan

Students will be informally assessed during the small group portion of the activity, i.e. the teacher should walk around and make sure that students remain on task, making note of those that do not.

The worksheets the students fill-out will be used by the students as a brain-storming activity and for their journal entries, so the students do not need to be assessed on the worksheet.

The journal entries will be assessed based on the attached rubric.

Bibliography

http://www.etni.org.il/teachers/janeberman/fireice.htm