Learning Objectives In this lesson, students will have opportunities to:
Standards
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.5 Explain how a series of chapters, scenes, or stanzas fits together to provide the overall structure of a particular story, drama, or poem.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative language such as metaphors and similes.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.6 Describe how a narrator’s or speaker’s point of view influences how events are described.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.7 Analyze how visual and multimedia elements contribute to the meaning, tone, or beauty of a text (e.g., graphic novel, multimedia presentation of fiction, folktale, myth, poem).
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text, including how characters in a story or drama respond to challenges or how the speaker in a poem reflects upon a topic; summarize the text.
Materials and Resources To teach this lesson you will need:
Activity Description 1. Introduce students to the term “ballad” and explain the difference between what this term means when describing popular music — a slow, usually sentimental song — and the more technical meanings it has when classifying a poem. You may want to use a projector to share the sample sight passages on the next page.
You will want them to know that the ballad is a lively storytelling form of poetry, and that this story typically gets told in a particular way:
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
What is troubling the knight-at-arms? Why is he alone and hanging back? Why is nature silent? The ballad plunges into its subject, and leaves us with questions.
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
Full beautiful, a fairy’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her EYES were WILD.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And MADE sweet MOAN.
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would SET him DANcing.
Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labours;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And PRIam’sNEIGHbours.
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
What’s most important is for students to get the sound of the ballad in their ears, and to learn that ballads tell stories in a particularly lively, scene-by-scene fashion.
2. To help students hear the sound of the ballad, ask students to assemble in pairs or groups of three and ask them to read one of the ballads from the Poetry In Voice online anthology at www.poetryinvoice.com. The following poems are in ballad stanzas, with some variation:
· “Miniver Cheevy,” by Edwin Arlington Robinson
· “Annabel Lee,” by Edgar Allan Poe
· “Jabberwocky,” by Lewis Carroll
· “A Red, Red Rose,” by Robert Burns
· “It Couldn’t Be Done,” by Edgar Albert Guest
· “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” by John Keats
· “The Listeners,” by Walter de la Mare
3. Set out the supermarket tabloids or tabloid articles that you have gathered, and let students cut out or select the articles they wish to write about. If several students wish to write about the same article, let them. It will be fun for them to compare their ballads when they are through. Now have the students write a ballad about the event or the person in the tabloid article, using either the standard ballad stanza (alternating 4-beat and 3-beat lines, rhyming ABCB) or some variation. If they choose a variation, they should stick with the same pattern throughout the ballad. Be sure to tell the students that the poem can and probably should be funny. The minimum length should be four or five stanzas.
4. After the students have drafted their ballads, you can let them take the drafts home to be polished and revised before performing them in class. Or, if you prefer, you can ask students to share their “tabloid ballads” right away with the class.
5. Since this is a fun, informal lesson, you may not want to evaluate student ballads in any formal way. If you want to respond to them, however, or have fellow students respond, you may want to use questions like these:
Retrieved from http://www.poetryinvoice.com/teachers/lesson-plans/ballad
- Listen to the sounds of several ballads being spoken
- Listen to how ballads tell stories
- Learn to hear, and to write, the typical rhythms of the four-line ballad stanza, with possible variations
- Write a comic ballad themselves, using the definitive rhythm and narrative structure of classical ballads
Standards
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.5 Explain how a series of chapters, scenes, or stanzas fits together to provide the overall structure of a particular story, drama, or poem.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative language such as metaphors and similes.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.6 Describe how a narrator’s or speaker’s point of view influences how events are described.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.7 Analyze how visual and multimedia elements contribute to the meaning, tone, or beauty of a text (e.g., graphic novel, multimedia presentation of fiction, folktale, myth, poem).
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.5.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text, including how characters in a story or drama respond to challenges or how the speaker in a poem reflects upon a topic; summarize the text.
Materials and Resources To teach this lesson you will need:
- Copies of supermarket tabloid articles, either in the newspapers themselves (The National Enquirer, The Sun, People Magazine, US Weekly, In Touch, and so on) or clipped selectively from these publications by you
- LCD projector or overhead transparencies of sample sight passages (see next page)
Activity Description 1. Introduce students to the term “ballad” and explain the difference between what this term means when describing popular music — a slow, usually sentimental song — and the more technical meanings it has when classifying a poem. You may want to use a projector to share the sample sight passages on the next page.
You will want them to know that the ballad is a lively storytelling form of poetry, and that this story typically gets told in a particular way:
- Ballads start quickly, without much introduction or narration, as in the opening of “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by John Keats:
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.
What is troubling the knight-at-arms? Why is he alone and hanging back? Why is nature silent? The ballad plunges into its subject, and leaves us with questions.
- Ballads often jump from scene to scene as they move from stanza to stanza, without much exposition or narrative to connect the events.
- Often, ballads use dialogue, rather than narration, to advance the plot.
- The narrator generally remains anonymous and unidentified, so that our focus stays on the story, rather than on the storyteller.
- The most basic ballad stanza uses alternating 4-beat and 3-beat lines, with the second line rhyming with the fourth (see examples).
- In “Jabberwocky,” Lewis Carroll writes stanzas of 4-beat lines with alternating rhymes, so that line 1 rhymes with line 3, and line 2 with line 4, like this
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
- In “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” John Keats writes ballad stanzas made of three 4-beat lines, and then a 2-beat closing line, like this:
Full beautiful, a fairy’s child;
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her EYES were WILD.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And MADE sweet MOAN.
- Edwin Arlington Robinson uses the same ballad stanza as Keats in “Miniver Cheevy”:
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would SET him DANcing.
Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labours;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And PRIam’sNEIGHbours.
- Edgar Allan Poe adds an extra pair of lines to the ballad stanzas of “Annabel Lee,” mostly continuing the rhythmic alternation of 4- and 3-beat lines:
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
What’s most important is for students to get the sound of the ballad in their ears, and to learn that ballads tell stories in a particularly lively, scene-by-scene fashion.
2. To help students hear the sound of the ballad, ask students to assemble in pairs or groups of three and ask them to read one of the ballads from the Poetry In Voice online anthology at www.poetryinvoice.com. The following poems are in ballad stanzas, with some variation:
· “Miniver Cheevy,” by Edwin Arlington Robinson
· “Annabel Lee,” by Edgar Allan Poe
· “Jabberwocky,” by Lewis Carroll
· “A Red, Red Rose,” by Robert Burns
· “It Couldn’t Be Done,” by Edgar Albert Guest
· “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” by John Keats
· “The Listeners,” by Walter de la Mare
3. Set out the supermarket tabloids or tabloid articles that you have gathered, and let students cut out or select the articles they wish to write about. If several students wish to write about the same article, let them. It will be fun for them to compare their ballads when they are through. Now have the students write a ballad about the event or the person in the tabloid article, using either the standard ballad stanza (alternating 4-beat and 3-beat lines, rhyming ABCB) or some variation. If they choose a variation, they should stick with the same pattern throughout the ballad. Be sure to tell the students that the poem can and probably should be funny. The minimum length should be four or five stanzas.
4. After the students have drafted their ballads, you can let them take the drafts home to be polished and revised before performing them in class. Or, if you prefer, you can ask students to share their “tabloid ballads” right away with the class.
5. Since this is a fun, informal lesson, you may not want to evaluate student ballads in any formal way. If you want to respond to them, however, or have fellow students respond, you may want to use questions like these:
- Did the ballad use some version of the traditional ballad stanza?
- Did it tell its story quickly, moving scene by scene?
- Did it use dialogue to move the plot forward?
- Did it use typical ballad tools, like repeated lines or phrases?
- Did it honor a typical rhyme scheme of the ballad (or variation thereof)?
- Did it reveal some element of humor?
- Was it memorable?
Retrieved from http://www.poetryinvoice.com/teachers/lesson-plans/ballad