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Grade 4 English Language Arts · Level 2, Read Literature Closely

Recognize How Poems, Drama, and Prose Work

Distinguish prose, drama, and poetry and use structural elements such as verse, rhythm, casts, dialogue, and stage directions.

How the lesson starts: Recognize How Poems, Drama, and Prose Work

1. The Word Circus

   Welcome to the Word Circus! Ringmaster Loop the llama has three tents. One holds stories, one holds poems, and one holds plays. Tonight, Loop tells the same tiny tale in all three tents. Each one is built a different way.

2. Three tents, three shapes

   A story is prose. It has sentences, paragraphs, and a narrator. Talking sits in quotation marks. A poem has short lines, line breaks, and rhythm. A play, or drama, has speaker names, colons, and stage directions in parentheses.

3. Which tent is this?

   Loop reads a page. Rosa tiptoes toward the pie. Then, Rosa, colon, just one bite! Then Grandma Bea clicks on the light. Look at how it's built. A speaker name before the lines, and directions in parentheses. It's a drama!