4 Fun Ways to Teach Author’s Tone in Middle School

When I throw around terms like author’s tone at the beginning of the school year, I get a lot of blank, blinking stares. By the end of the year, though, analyzing an author’s tone is one of our favorite skills to practice! Here are 4 fun ways to teach author’s tone in middle school:

1. Give your students multiple texts about the same topic.

I don’t know I ever taught before I discovered Georgia Bragg’s books, but they are perfect for teaching author’s tone. I like to read chapters from Bragg’s book, How They Choked, and compare them to videos from the Nest Animated Hero Classics series. Bragg’s tone is critical, snarky, and irreverent, while the Nest videos cover many of the exact same topics in a respectful, admiring, hopeful tone. (I wrote more about how I teach How They Choked in this blog post.)

2. Let students illustrate different tones visually.

Encourage your students to illustrate different tones with markers, colored pencils, or even paint. Maybe an aggressive tone looks like red stars while a grim tone looks like gray clouds. You can then display the illustrated tones on the classroom walls! (You can use blank paper or use pre-made templates.)

3. Have your students act out a single scenario using a variety of tones.

Give the whole class a random scenario, such as “the rollercoaster is stuck in the middle of the ride” or “the ice cream machine at the fast-food restaurant is broken.” Then split the class into groups of 4 or 5 students, and give each group a different tone like bitter, grim, hopeful, sarcastic, etc. Have each group act out the scenario in their given tone and let the rest of the class guess which tone was illustrated! (Pre-made game materials are available here.)