Conferences, Mood, and Connotation

While class began the usual way, it was also unusual. Today, students worked to complete the green sheet they got yesterday (see below), and I conferenced with students based on their Quarter 1 Reflections from yesterday. This meant reading time was longer! Hooray! Coincidentally, having longer reading time is what a lot of students said they wanted on their reflections.

Learning About Compound and Complex Sentences

First Quarter Reflection Sheet

After I conferenced with each student, it was time to play Kahoot! This Kahoot! was designed to help students begin to learn and review the FANBOYS (coordinating conjunctions) and AAAWWUBBIS (subordinating conjunctions) grammar rules that the green sheet introduced them to. Today’s Kahoot! was just a practice, and students are not expected to be proficient in these skills yet, but it allowed us to go over the rules a bit more while having fun.

Any Kahoot! or grammar/punctuation activity is always linked HERE on my website, so students can review the concepts that are giving them a hard time.

Once we were done with Kahoot!, students watched the video below and discussed during the discussion parts in order to review mood and see how word choice can really affect mood.

Next, each group was given a set of words, and they had to arrange the words. All of the words had similar definitions, or denotation, but the connotations, or feelings/ideas associated with the word, were different. Students arranged the words on their desks from most negative to most positive, and then they were able to walk around and check out the way other groups had organized different sets.

For example, one group had words all associated with self-esteem, but in the grouping were both the word “confident” and “smug.” “Confident” has a much more positive connotation, and people would probably be preferred to be described as “confident” rather than “smug.”

Next students looked at two different pictures and even though the pictures were both of a tree, they each had a very different feeling and, therefore, needed to be described in different ways.

For example, for the first picture, students wrote the sentence “The wind screamed through the trees.” but on the second one, they wrote, “The wind danced with with trees.” With just a slight change of words, the whole mood of the sentence changes, and students will need to pay particular attention to this when they begin writing their terrifying scenes next week.

Class ended with students working on the handout below on their own or with a partner.

DenotationConnotation Practice Exercise


  1. Read for 25 minutes.