Supporting Tone and Mood: Ready-to-Go-Tip

Need a quick idea to get your students annotating for tone and mood within a demonstration or mentor text? Here is a ready-to-print set, along with ideas for making your own or using student work as your guide!

The Context

Determining what your students know about tone and mood is a good first step toward identification in text. You might start with an image like the one below to elicit a conversation.

Start with questions like, which of these places would you like to visit? How would you feel in each? After hearing responses, you can explain that those feelings and descriptive words they used convey the mood of the images. Then try asking: Which one looks cheerful, spooky, calm? The answers will likely be based on their own experiences. This is the tone intended by the author. This can then be transitioned toward text in the same way. What images are created in your mind? What is the mood? What is the tone?

Why it Matters

One way writers grow is through developing their word choice to convey images and feelings. Bringing awareness and curiosity to these qualities of writing can bring about vocabulary development, better inferencing of key details in a text, as well as craft moves as writers.

What’s Next

Below is a demonstration text. The teacher copy identifies areas where you could show your students annotations from a text. The three stories linked below show how word choice can change the mood and tone of a story, even when the characters and plot stay basically the same. This commonly known story is one way to show students that creating imagery through word choice can be as simple as making something cheerful or spooky.

Give it a try!