Robert Frost - "Out, Out-"

Designed to accompany the Robert Frost poetry anthology for CIE AS English, but will be appropriate for any senior study of the poem “Out, Out - “.

The lesson first encourages students to recognise and understand the ideas within the soliloquy by Macbeth that the poem’s title is alluding to, and then make inferences about the poem based on that understanding. Students then consider the power and potential significance of a buzz-saw from the 1910s through looking at images and a short video.
The main part of the lesson then asks students to identify the speaker and situation, discusses the emotional response provoked by the death of the boy, supplies further comprehension questions to deepen their understanding, and then 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. Blank and annotated copies of the poem are also supplied.