If your students were blown away by our nonfiction story, “Saving America’s Wolves,” show them this 1.5-minute video of synchronized howling!
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The Wolf
Powerful words create the feeling of a wolf alone in the wild
By Georgia Roberts Durston
From the May / June 2019 Issue
Learning Objective: Students will identify the mood of this descriptive, rhyming poem.
Featured Skill:
Mood,
Other Key Skills: rhyme, interpreting text, inference, text features, compare and contrast
Standards
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Fun Fact
The poet, Georgia Roberts Durston, wrote several Boy Scout books in the 1900s under the pseudonym Col. George Durston.
More About the Article
Key Skills
Mood, rhyme, interpreting text, inference, text features, compare and contrast
Step-by-Step Lesson Plan
1. PREPARING TO READ
Set a Purpose for Reading (10 minutes)
- Begin by reading the Mood bubble for the class. Prepare students to listen and look for examples of rhyme in the poem.
- Read aloud the Background Knowledge copy at the top of the page. Direct students to the nonfiction feature on page 4. This article explains why gray wolves almost died out in the U.S. and what government and wildlife experts did to save them. (See page T2 for the Nonfiction Lesson Plan.)
- Have students look at the photograph that accompanies the poem. Ask them to describe what the wolf is doing. What mood or feeling does this photo create? Ask students to compare this image and the photograph of the gray wolf on page 5 of the nonfiction feature.
2. READING AND DISCUSSING
- Read the poem for the class or play our audio version. Explain that wails in stanza 1 means making a loud, sorrowful sound. In stanza 2 shuns means avoids or gets out of the way of something.
- Project or distribute the Close-Reading and Critical- Thinking Questions and discuss them as a class while students refer to the poem in their issues. (These questions are now available in Google Forms, so students can type answers and email them to you.)
Close-Reading and Critical-Thinking Questions (15 minutes)
- What words rhyme in the first stanza? (rhyme) wails, sails; rim, him
- What do the other animals do when they give the wolf “plenty, and plenty of room”? (interpreting text) They get out of his way when they see him. Why do you think they behave this way? (inference) The other animals are afraid of the wolf.
- In the second stanza, what mood do the words lonely, shuns, and gloom create? (mood) These words create a feeling of being alone and lonely.
- Look at the photo. What is the wolf doing when he is “Singing the song of his long, wild heart”? (text features) He is howling at the moon.
- In the first and last stanzas, why do you think howling at the moon seems to comfort the wolf? (inference) Answers will vary. He could be comforted because howling connects him to the natural world.
- How is the wolf in the poem the same or different from the wolf at the beginning and end of the nonfiction article? (compare and contrast) Answers will vary. The wolf in the poem lives on his own; the wolf in the nonfiction story is part of a pack. In both texts, other animals stay away from the wolf.
3. SKILL BUILDING
- Call on a volunteer to read the Think and Write box.
- Distribute our Write Your Own Poem Activity. Remind students to include at least four words that conjure a certain mood.
Text-to-Speech