Teaching Mood and Tone to Middle School Students

Mood and tone are two of the most difficult and abstract concepts for young learners to grasp - especially in middle school, when the concepts are typically first introduced. To many middle school kids, a happy story is a happy story, a scary story is a scary story, and a sad story is a sad story. There is no accounting for the way a story is told and how that affects the feelings it creates or carries.

Probably the more difficult of the two is tone: the author's feeling toward his or her subject. What makes teaching the concept even more daunting is the lack of good examples that truly demonstrate how an author's feeling carries into a work of fiction. In something such as an angry letter, the author's tone is obvious. But what about something like a short story?

Well, a few years ago, while mindlessly surfing the Internet for things to make me laugh away the day's stress, I came across a brilliant little trend that was growing in independent filmmaker circles. It's called trailer remixes (or recuts). In a trailer remix, a filmmaker or editor takes content from a famous film and creates a new preview, only this time with a decidedly different feel - often completely changing the genre.

There are two that I find work brilliantly in conveying the concepts of mood and tone to middle schoolers - and being that they're watching TV, it really grabs them. The first thing I do is show the original version of the "Sleepless in Seattle" trailer, which I show from my wife's copy (totally purchased and legal). Then I do the same for "The Shining," which is from my personal DVD copy. We discuss how the trailers feel, how the author feels about the movie, etc.