Year 8 are starting a poetry unit, and the teacher wants a first reading in which nobody can skip to the end. William Blake's 'A Poison Tree', from Songs of Experience (1794), is on four PowerPoint slides, one four-line stanza per slide. The teacher reads the first stanza aloud, stops on 'I told it not, my wrath did grow', and asks what the speaker might do with anger he has kept secret. Students write a prediction in their books, the next slide appears, and they note what Blake wrote instead: the wrath watered with tears, sunned with false smiles and grown into a tree bearing a bright apple. Before the last slide the class predicts what the foe will do now he has seen the apple shine.
With all four stanzas on a final slide, the teacher annotates the first two lines at the board as a model. Students copy two quotations into their books and write a paragraph on how the image of the tree shows what hidden anger becomes, and what the word 'glad' in the last two lines tells us about the speaker.
Tools: PowerPoint Nine ideas for your own version in Generate
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