READING A NARRATIVE POETRY: THE SONG OF HIAWATHA…

About this resource

What's inside this resource

These worksheets are perfect for teaching Reading Skills through a Narrative Poetry - The Song of Hiawatha by H. W. Longfellow. These no prep activities would be great for ELA lessons or ELA centers. Your students will love these ready to use exercises that are well planned for student engagement.

After completing this New Bloom’s Taxonomy-based activities students will be able to:

Find the meaning of challenging words and expressions in the poem.
Identify the key ideas of the poem.
Use textual clues to answer the retrieval and inferential questions.
Analyse the poem to find its poetry elements – genre, message, tone, context, perspective, point of view, structure, rhyme scheme, purpose and metre.
Evaluate the poet’s use of personification, hyperbole, imagery, repetition, alliteration and onomatopoeia.
Write a summary, make a character description, explain the reader impact of figurative language and create a critical appreciation of the poem.

What's included

A planning page listing six Bloom's-taxonomy sessions with their learning objectives and matching "I can" success criteria
The full text of four Common Core ELA-Literacy reading-literature codes printed under the heading COMMON CORE STANDARDS
A contents list naming all twenty-one exercises grouped by Bloom's level
Three Remembering exercises: fourteen word-to-meaning matches, eight adjective-to-noun matches, and four inverted-word-order matches
Two Understanding exercises: nine true-or-false statements and an eight-gap word bank on Hiawatha's animal lessons
Retrieval and inferential multiple-choice sets, several carrying "Tick all the correct answers" items
A poetry-elements criteria table plus a three-part question set on genre, message, tone, context, perspective, point of view, structure, rhyme scheme, purpose and metre
PEE tables and multiple-choice checks covering personification, hyperbole, imagery, repetition, alliteration and onomatopoeia
Creating tasks: an eighteen-gap summary cloze, an eight-row character-sketch guide for Nokomis, a critical-appreciation frame, and four PEEL reader-impact prompts
Worked responses printed beneath each exercise, including full model paragraphs for the summary, character description, critical appreciation and every PEEL prompt

Resource types: Worksheets & Printables, Worksheets

In the classroom

Teaching tips & learning objectives

Learning objectives

Determine the meaning of archaic and descriptive vocabulary from the poem — wigwam, linden, sinews, tresses, plumes, flecks — by matching each to its definition
State the central idea of the extract and complete an eighteen-gap summary of Hiawatha's early life from a supplied word bank
Answer retrieval questions from explicit lines and inferential questions that require drawing conclusions, including multi-answer items
Identify the poem's genre, message, tone, context, perspective, point of view, structure, rhyme scheme, purpose and metre against a defined criteria table
Evaluate the poet's use of personification, hyperbole, imagery, repetition, alliteration and onomatopoeia in PEE tables and expand the same evidence into PEEL reader-impact paragraphs

Teaching tips

The six Bloom's sessions listed on the opening page run in the same order as the exercises, so the packet can be taught as six short lessons instead of one long sitting
Worked responses sit directly beneath each exercise rather than in a separate section, so cover or remove them before duplicating pages for students
Exercise 8's criteria table defines every poetry element before Exercise 9 tests it; teach the table first and leave it on display while students work the three question parts
The PEE tables in Exercises 10, 11 and 13 draw on the same lines as the PEEL prompts in Exercises 18 to 21, so students can reuse their PEE notes when drafting the longer paragraphs
Model responses cite the poem by verse and line — Verse 4 lines 6-7 for personification, Verse 2 lines 10-11 for hyperbole — so number the verses of the extract before marking

Skills covered

Vocabulary in context — students match fourteen terms from the poem, including wigwam, linden, sinews, tresses and flecks, to definitions such as "A hut or tent" and "Woman's long hairs" before any comprehension work begins.
Retrieval and inferential comprehension — Exercise 6 asks who Ishkoodah was and what bound Hiawatha safely, while Exercise 7 asks what the poem is about and why Nokomis explained the flecks on the moon with a story.
Poetic-device analysis — PEE tables ask students to state a point, cite evidence and explain the effect for personification, hyperbole, imagery, repetition, alliteration and onomatopoeia.
Structured paragraph writing — PEEL frames supply sentence starters such as "One of the sound poetic devices used here in this poem is…" and "This is effective because…" that students complete into full reader-impact paragraphs.
Character description — an eight-row sketch guide covering appearance, traits, action, words, thinking and opinion is used to build a written description of Nokomis.

Good to know

Questions teachers ask about this resource

Which portion of Longfellow's poem do the exercises work from?

An extract. The opening page names the text as "An Extract of 'The Song of Hiawatha' by W. H. Longfellow", and the model critical appreciation states that the whole poem runs to 5,314 lines "though we are analyzing just five verses".

How do the PEE exercises and the PEEL exercises differ?

The PEE tables in Exercises 10, 11 and 13 are grids where students record a Point, its Evidence and an Explanation for one device at a time. The PEEL prompts in Exercises 18 to 21 add a Link step back to reader impact and hand students sentence starters to build a continuous paragraph.

What does the Nokomis character task ask students to produce?

A written description built from an eight-row sketch guide. Students gather the character's name, role, appearance, traits, action, words, thinking and the opinions others hold, then join them with supplied connectives — "On top of that", "More importantly", "Furthermore", "Moreover" — into a continuous description.