A Teacher's Guide

Comfort
by Carolee Dean

• About the Author

• Activities
Poetry coffee house
Behind the scenes
Pull a poem out of a hat
Look who's talking
My voice is changing
Safe house

About the Author

Carolee Dean holds a bachelor's degree in music therapy and a master of science degree in
communicative disorders. She has worked with children and adolescents in the areas of head
trauma rehabilitation, emotional disturbance, and special education. While a speech/language
pathologist with the public schools, Carolee participated in the Wrinkle Writing Project, a
collaboration with the University of New Mexico Drama Department and local schools. The project
focuses on using creative drama to encourage writing skills in the classroom. Carolee has
appeared at numerous conferences and workshops for teachers offering presentations on
incorporating the creative arts into the curriculum. She has appeared as a guest poet at schools
and offers creative writing workshops for students. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with
her husband and three children. For more information about school appearances, write to:

Carolee Dean
P.O. Box 93503
Albuquerque, NM 87199-3503

Activities

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Poetry coffee house

Create a schoolwide open-mike poetry reading. Invite local poets, teachers, and students to read
their original poems.

Behind the scenes

Clip pictures out of a magazine. Advertisements work well because they often contain symbolism
and metaphor. Look past the obvious. What might be going on behind the scenes? Use your
ideas for the beginning of a short story or poem.

Pull a poem out of a hat

Students write adjectives and nouns on slips of paper. Put the nouns in one hat and the
adjectives in another. Students randomly choose one word from each hat to create an original
poem title (i.e. "Banana Sunrise," "The Inconsiderate Shoelace," "Angry Pencils"). Recollect the
nouns and adjectives and redistribute two times so that students have three titles to choose
from. Students choose their favorite title and write a poem.

Look who's talking

Pick a line of dialogue from Comfort. Read it out loud. Can other students guess which character
is talking? How can you tell the difference? What are your clues? Discuss the differences between
the voices of Kenny, Cindy, and Mama.

My voice is changing

Kenny talks about his "school" voice and his "home" voices. Discuss how people change their
voices (tone, vocabulary, level of formality) depending on the situation and who they are talking
to. Role=play the following situations and discuss how you can tell the difference between the
characters based on the voice they use: a policeman gives a woman a speeding ticket; a
principal tells a father his son is going to be suspended; a girl borrows her mother's favorite
dress without permission, rips it, and is now telling her mother.

Safe house

Kenny says on pg. 122, " For me, school was the one place I felt safe, the one place I could relax
and let down my guard." Discuss where you feel safe and why.

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