BROWNSTOWN

Onomatopoeia, hyperbole and simile may not be the most exciting things to learn from a book.

So Brownstown Central Middle School language arts teacher Blakli Wehmiller decided to make it fun for her eighth-graders.

She randomly assigned the kids into groups of four or five and gave them a list of 10 literary devices and a theme. The groups then had to come up with a skit.

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Not only were the students learning about the literary terms and educating their classmates, they also were being courageous by getting up and speaking in front of the class.

“I tell them, ‘This is something you’re going to have to do in your life at least a few times, so if you can get comfortable right now as an eighth-grader and do a little bit of it now, it’s going to be so easy for you. It’s going to be cake,'” Wehmiller said of public speaking.

When Wehmiller was a freshman language arts teacher at Scottsburg a few years ago, she had her class read “Romeo and Juliet,” watch the movie and then do a skit from one of the major scenes.

This is her second year teaching at Brownstown, but this was her first time trying the literary skits.

“I’ve noticed when kids work in groups, they are not so scared about getting up in front of the class,” she said. “Literary terms, a lot of them are pretty fun, and they can make them fun if they put them into something.”

Once the 18 groups were formed and they had their topic, Wehmiller gave them a week to put the skits together. The topics included asking that special someone out, getting into an argument with your parents, breaking up and getting a pep talk from a coach.

“They were super pumped when they started drawing these, saying ‘Oh, that’s awesome’ or ‘That will be so good,'” Wehmiller said.

Wehmiller also showed a video that gave examples of all of the topics, and she even acted some of them out to help her students understand them more.

“I was like, ‘I don’t want you to copy this because that’s plagiarism. But I want you to morph it into something you want,'” she said.

The groups then worked on writing their own script for the skit. Each presentation ended with a PowerPoint defining each literary term and giving an example of how they used them in their skit.

In that portion of the presentation, Wehmiller wanted them to take on the role of teacher, making eye contact and interacting with the audience.

Wehmiller said it was interesting to see the groups work together.

“There were a few groups that didn’t work well together. They were arguing,” she said. “I was like, ‘Hey, you’re in a group. It’s life. This is kind of why I put you in these groups. I wanted to see you work well, and you’re wasting time arguing, and you could be working.'”

When the groups presented, Wehmiller made sure everyone in the class paid attention.

“I put emphasis on respect,” she said. “If I can teach them anything, I want to teach them to respect one another.”

After each presentation, the class discussed what was good and what could have been improved. Wehmiller said she also was going to have the group members assess each other, and that information would just be for her.

Eighth-graders Noah Sarver and Sindi Herrera were in different groups. They said it was interesting working with random people.

“It’s kind of hard to do it, but we learned more about the other people,” Sarver said. “It was cool doing that and figuring out how they worked in a group and how well that they helped and contributed to it.”

Herrera said her group worked well together.

“You were able to get different ideas and put them all together and make something good out of it,” she said.

Neither Sarver nor Herrera had a problem with public speaking.

“I don’t get stage fright,” Sarver said. “It’s more or less getting used to it, and you don’t get nervous in front of people.”

Herrera said she wasn’t nervous because she has done public speaking in other classes.

“I like entertaining people in that way,” she said. “It’s being able to know what the audience likes and expects, learning it in a fun way.”

The skits were a good way to learn literary terms and help people get comfortable with public speaking, Sarver said.

“If you don’t learn in an enthusiastic way or a good way, then you’re not going to remember it or retain it,” he said. “But if you learn it in a really good way, that jogs your memory when you think about it.”

Wehmiller said it was a good project for her class, and she plans on doing it every year. There are more than 200 literary terms, so she said she will use different ones each time.

“I said, ‘You will have a class your freshman year in college, and they’ll be talking about these literary devices, and you’ll remember,'” she said. “It’ll trigger, ‘My crazy language arts teacher in eighth grade, we learned those. I know what an idiom is because of that skit.'”