Robert Frost - An Encounter

Designed to accompany the Robert Frost poetry anthology for CIE AS English, but will be appropriate for any senior study of the poem An Encounter.
The lesson first encourages students to make inferences about the character of Odysseus through a picture starter. Students then consider the significance of the title, in light of this consideration of a hero within classical myth and legend.
The main part of the lesson then asks students to identify the speaker and situation, discusses the “creature” “encountered” by the speaker, and gives key vocabulary that will be useful when analysing the poem. Students then annotate the poem for technique, with pictures supplied as visual cues for understanding and memory. As a plenary, students demonstrate their knowledge of the poem and the tone used by Frost within it by completing a targeted, scaffolded essay paragraph about technique, with an example given.
The resource also includes a worksheet for a subsequent lesson or homework, intended to consolidate students’ knowledge of the poem through a mix of visual tasks and more complex comprehension questions, and a comparative activity with an earlier poem, “The Wood-Pile”. Blank and annotated copies of the poem are also supplied.