Divide your students into teams and have them brainstorm and share tongue twisters with each other, such as “She Sells Sea Shells…” or “How Much Wood Could a Woodchuck Chuck?” Have each team elect a member of their group to present a tongue twister to the class, and afterwards have students vote on the best tongue twister performance. Ask students to consider what makes tongue twisters so hard to say, and what specific sounds and repetitions they notice.
Pass out copies of Byron’s poem “She Walks in Beauty” to your students. Tell the class to pay particular attention to the sounds in the poem, and have one of your students read it aloud. Ask students what they noticed about the sounds used. Your students will most likely notice the use of end rhymes. Discuss with them as well the use of alliteration, or repeated initial consonant sounds, as in “cloudless climes”; assonance, or repeated vowel sounds, as in “shade” and “ray”; and consonance, or shared consonant sounds, as in “softly lightens.” Once you have provided these terms and given examples, ask your students what other examples they can find in the poem.
Giving your students five minutes to work, have them attempt to write poems that avoid all sound techniques. Afterwards, ask if anyone managed to avoid all rhyme, all alliteration, all assonance and consonance. If any student says that she has succeeded, ask her to read her poem aloud -- most likely, there will be some consonance or assonance. Discuss with students why it is difficult to avoid these kinds of sounds, and how language is naturally musical, even when we don’t mean it to be.
Pass out copies of Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” to your students and have one student read it aloud. Ask students what sound techniques they notice at work in the poem. Discuss how the use of these techniques makes the poem “hold together” even though the words Carroll uses are nonsense. Have students write their own nonsense poems. They should incorporate techniques of rhyme, consonance, assonance and alliteration in poems with few or no recognizable nouns, verbs and adjectives.