Rebecca J. Hickey
Regarding the workshop that I propose, the Extended Day Academy (EDA) is available to students for 1 hour and 15 minutes, two days a week. This leaves me approximately 2 and ½ hours for approximately 8 weeks to conduct theprogram.
Lessons will include some of the strategies that Koch suggests in
Wishes, Lies, and Dreams
, such as creating a Color poem and a Comparison poem. I would also like to broaden and add new dimensions to some of these elementary ideas, challenging my middle school students. Koch's idea of a collaborative poem, for example, will be slightly altered. My students will each contribute a line of poetry to create one titled work by the whole group. We will begin by observing one of the rooms in our school. Not only will standard classrooms be used, but also rooms like a locker room or custodial closet. I will compile a list of areas and students will randomly select which room they will observe. I want students to observe their surroundings differently than they might during the day. There may well be activity in the room they choose, but this will only help to add content and character to their work. Students will work individually so there can be no sense of what the finished product will be. They will have to trust that their individual work will benefit the whole.
Observational poetry, in various formats, will begin our workshop. In three lessons I will introduce students to new ways of viewing poetry through new eyes. My point is to show that poetry can be made manageable, that it is not all as daunting as Shakespearean sonnets. By beginning slowly and ensuring success right away, students gain faith in their abilities to move onto more difficult pieces.
The workshop will begin on our first meeting with an introduction to what we are doing and why I wanted to lead a workshop like this. I believe that on some occasions, especially in out-of-school experiences like this one, the students are set at ease much more quickly when the instructor can share a little bit about the "mystery" behind lessons and learning. It's important that we as teachers show our hand when it comes to gaining the trust of students in our class. It will be very important when I ask them to begin writing their own poetry, that I already have their trust.
Also, at this first meeting I have provided a journal for every student. One of the requirements for successful completion of EDA will be the regular use of a journal to write their poetry assignments, but also students should use it to record general observations that may lend themselves to future poems. Words, phrases, ideas that inspire the students should be kept in this journal
Our second meeting together will begin straight away with the poem about rooms in our school. This poem is collaborative as well as observational in nature. This first lesson is meant to be a safe and fun way for students to get their feet wet writing poetry. The only expectation is that they write two lines about what they sense, see, feel, smell in their assigned room. The lines may be full sentences or fragments however as a group, we should be able to identify what room the lines are describing. The only roles I hope to play in this creation are as recorder and moderator. The students will have to decide the order of the lines and what they want their poem to say. As with all of the work that my students create, this poem will have to be named. It is important to give a title to their work, as naming something implies validity and value. I choose to use this exercise first, because it is light-hearted and there is little individual risk in dealing with such a benign topic as school rooms. Also, students are not be working on a poem of their own, so the risk is minimal.
This lesson is taught using the Big6. As a group we comprehend what we have written, and synthesize the lines creating one final product, evaluating and adjusting as we go. Students are learning that what they wrote in isolation was just a small part of the big picture. They learn that their contribution, added to the group work, has a new, altered meaning. Just as a paragraph in a text has one meaning, when read as part of a chapter, the greater intention is seen.
As a follow-up lesson to the first observational poem, we'll try something more concrete. This second lesson is called "Dancing Raisins." The goal of this experience is simple. Students will observe how raisins behave when they are dropped into a glass of clear, carbonated liquid, like Sprite. I will place two to three clear glasses half-full of Sprite on the table. My instructions to the students are to pay attention to every detail that is in front of them. I will then drop four to five raisins into the glasses. Students will have 1 minute to observe what happens in the glasses, before they write anything down.
This observational poem does not have any restrictions when it comes to format or length. As their first experience with me, writing their own poem, I want the lesson to be as free form as possible. If a student wishes to rhyme and make a more formal dissertation on the activities of raisins, it is the student's choice. I have no such expectations.
For their first take-home assignment for the workshop, I will ask students to write about something that they observe in their own homes. It may be a person with whom they live, their bedroom walls, or the street outside their house. The content is completely up to the student's discretion. The only requirements are that the poem is titled and has at least 15 lines.
It is important for students to know right away that their work will not be judged by myself or their classmates. I do, however, expect that they share some of what they have written throughout the course of the workshop. Sharing personal writing is an important step in learning to trust themselves and their efforts. At the end of every week I will collect the journals. Students may signal the work that they prefer I do not read by folding the page in half. It is my expectation that they will write in their journals at least three days a week.
After we have practiced some of the non-threatening ways to explore our universes through poetry, week three begins with a discussion about "What is Poetry?" Students will receive a glossary of poetic terms to keep in their journals as reference. I will touch briefly on historical uses and the importance of studying classic poets, as well as their relevance, if any, to the student's lives. Various formats such as metered poetry, calligrammes (picture poems), rhyming, and personification will be explored. In future lessons we will experiment with these forms.
To this point, we have not looked at or explored the works of some better known poets. I have intentionally waited to do this until after we have done some of our own work. Writing your own poetry can be a scary experience, and I wanted to ease any nervousness about that right away. However, reading and understanding other people's work is also a daunting task. As we use and examine our glossaries, we'll study examples of poetry terms and types. For example, we'll look the "Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie" by Gwendolyn Brooks and identify the qualities that make it a ballad. We will also delve into the story of Mabbie within the poem and look at the message that Brooks is sending the reader. "The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie" contains lessons about history and human nature embedded within it and by practicing their deductive reasoning and higher order thinking skills, I hope that students will be able to tell me about the underlying issues facing Mabbie and Gwendolyn Brooks during the time of the poem.
I would like to spend some time with a couple of other Brooks poems like "We Real Cool" and "Sadie and Maud." These two poems are so powerful in their clear and concise messages, I believe that students will readily identify with them. I am primarily interested in the reactions students will have to these poems and will ask that they make a journal entry in response to each of the poems.
After studying the Brooks poems my students will begin work on a color poem of their own. The choice of color words in "The Ballad of Chocolate Mabbie" makes all the difference in a reader's response to the poem. While the idea of color will be literal in the poem they write, the use of color words like 'lemon-hued' and 'chocolate' to describe Brooks' characters may help to get them started. The topic of their color poem can be anything they choose, as long as one color word per line is included. They will choose the format of the poem, the line length, and its rhyme scheme, if any.
By this point students will have written one collaborative poem, one observational poem, and one color poem. They also will have had the opportunity to journal ideas they might want to explore further on in our workshop. During the fourth week of our program, I will re-introduce the idea of our final project. I am asking that students write a narrative poem, of considerable length, written and illustrated in picture book format. Students may work independently or as a pair. If working as a team, students may divide responsibilities as they like. One may write and one may illustrate, or it can be a collaboration of all areas.
In preparation, I will illustrate the type of work I expect by sharing books such as
Hush! A Thai Lullaby
by Mingfong Ho, and
Harlem
by Walter Dean Myers. Each is a book which illustrates one poem.
I will read each book to the students talking, about the layout of the poem, how its words are illustrated on each page, and the flow of the story.
Hush! is a poem of the sounds that might lull a baby to sleep in Thailand.
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Hush!
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Who's that peeping from the ceiling?
A lizard is the culprit on this page, but each page asks a similar question and a different animal is found to be making the noise. All the while, if you examine the illustrations carefully, you can see that the baby is not sleeping at all, but rather crawling around the pages, never in the bed where his mother laid him.
Harlem
by Walter Dean Myers is a very different sort of poem and book. It is written with an older audience in mind and the graphics reflect a more mature reader. They are collage-like with very bold colors. The poem is much longer and more complex than Hush! It is the story of the development of the city of Harlem, with all of its musical, and sometimes dangerous, elements. Neither poem rhymes, but there is a distinct beat in
Harlem
and a soothing repetition of words and phrases in Hush! Each book has something unique to offer its reader.
Students will have the remaining four weeks to work on and complete their poems. During this time we will also continue learning other forms of poetry and students will continue to write their own. We will cover fairly elementary processes such as the rhymed couplet using "Puzzled" by Margaret Hillert, and move to more experimental poetry like the calligramme. In a calligramme, a combination of the words calligraphy and telegram, the words of the poem are arranged into a visual symbol of the meaning or subject of the poem. I will show an example of Guillaume Apollinaire's work, "Heart, Crown and Mirror," and "Easter Wings" by George Herbert. We will move through these two forms quickly, so that my students will have the opportunity to experiment with them. For a take-home assignment, I ask that each student come back with at least one calligramme and three rhymed couplets.
Through week five the workshop has opened students up to the possibilities of learning through poetry. We have taken some of the mystery of poetry away and I have begun to show them how to write it on their own, by giving them examples of simple form and allowing them to do a lot of work outside of the workshop itself. As I mentioned previously, the purpose of the workshop is two-fold. I want to expose students to reading and writing poetry, but I also want them learn the process information problem-solving. Each task I assign to them is a problem that they must solve. What to write about it is only the first step, the task definition.
This is really a process of slowing the pace of learning. Students always seem to be in hurry to finish what they're doing, to make the due date. Because of this practice, though, they are missing the point of the exercise. To finish quickly is not the desired end result, but rather learning the material and becoming capable of drawing conclusions about what one has read is the ultimate goal.
Poetry is a natural solution to teaching students how to slow down and consider what they are reading. In order to fully appreciate a poem it must be taken line by line and then really thought about. Obviously, the true meaning of a poem is not often as it first appears. Two techniques can assist students in fully understanding the meaning of a poem. First, read the poem aloud. When students can hear a work being read, they have time to listen closely to word choice, beat, rhyme scheme, if there is one, and flow of the poem. As you read aloud you are forced to slow down and concentrate on each word as it is being said. The second strategy is to take each line as it comes and understand it by itself before adding it to the mix of other lines. Be sure that everyone understands all of the words and any meaning the line has in relation to the topic of the poem.
With all of the remaining poems I will use these methods when necessary to be sure that after a time students will be able to reread these poems and work on any further understanding and meaning that they might hold. "Jabberwocky" is an example of the type of poem which might require these methods.
For the last three weeks of the workshop we will continue to explore form, but will begin spending a greater amount of time on reading and understanding poetry. Meanwhile, we are continuing to write our own pieces gaining inspiration from what has been written in journals and also using some picture books. One of the books I will share with the students is Chris Van Allsburg's book
The Mysteries of Harris Burdick
, in which each page has a black and white painting, a title, and an opening sentence. Each page in this book serves as a great writing prompt. Students may use the painting, the sentences or both to devise their own comparison poem about the image on the page. A comparison poem is exactly as it sounds. Using like and as students create a poem comparing unusual elements. Kenneth Koch suggests in
Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry
that as students, people, get older, this sort of poem is more difficult to write. Children have a natural ability to perceive things around them without attaching a judgment. Their ideas are still unconventional and they are still comfortable writing them down. Middle school students may have already reached the point where they find it difficult to let their imaginations roam, but I am interested to see how this picture book can help.
Nonsense poems and odes will be the final types of poetry that we will study together. I have chosen "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll as the best example of a nonsense poem to share. There is such a beautiful use of language using words that don't exist. Carroll tricks the reader into thinking that he's speaking proper English during this story-telling. There are examples throughout the poem of portmanteau words. These are words that have been created using elements of two other words. For example, the word smog is combination of smoke and fog, thereby creating the portmanteau word - smog. Carroll creates some of his language this way.
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'Twas brillig , and the slithy toves
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Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
Slithy is a combination of lithe and slimy. My challenge to the students is to first tell me the story of the poem and then identify some of the other portmanteau words and how they were designed. This is a fun exercise once the students understand that there is in fact a real story being told and once they allow themselves to think about what these fake mean. Each of the phrases and words helps to create a mood for the poem. I would like for my students to identify that mood and recognize that what they have learned from the poem was not written down in front of them. They had to use intuitive skills, as well as, reasoning abilities.
After reading "Jabberwocky" and studying the devices of the poem we will write our own nonsense poetry with the help of a book called
A Cheese and Tomato Spider
by Nick Sharratt. This book is a children's book with flaps that allow the reader to play with disparate elements, ideas or elements that you would not normally put together. By having students replicate elements from the poems that we've read, they have been able to practice the techniques they've learned, but also they have practiced the process of learning to understand. When they write their own poems, students are using what they know and using knowledge is a surefire way to remember what you've been taught. Students are past only reading and are into synthesizing what they know and making connections between what they read and their own lives.
During the final two weeks of the program students will be concentrating on their final projects. Having had six weeks to think about a poem that they want to write and illustrate, they will have the four remaining sessions to work. The last type of poetry I want to share with my students is the ode. I have chosen to give them "Ode to a Tomato," "Ode to Laziness," and "Ode to my Suit" written by Pablo Neruda. We'll explore the importance of personification and the natural world in poetry using these odes as examples. These poems are all written in both English and Spanish. It is likely that some of the students in the workshop are native Spanish speakers, so we'll have an opportunity to hear the poems in both languages. Students will then, of course, be asked to write an ode of their own.
Through the reading and discussion about all of the poems I've mentioned above, it is my intention to teach my students about the value of taking risks with their assumptions and conclusions. We will have read some fairly difficult poems. But, also, the students will have successfully deciphered some less complicated poetry on their own, giving them a sense of accomplishment. Knowing that they took on poetry, managed it and even wrote their own poems will serve them well in future assignments. To carry this feeling of accomplishment with them into other academic areas, knowing that if they slow down to look for the best strategy to solve the information problem, they will have continued success in their studies.
With all of the poets used in this workshop, I will have prepared myself on the biographical backgrounds and intent of the poets of these poems so that I might guide discussion. However, it is not my desire to stifle the insights of my students. The point of the workshop is for the students to learn to make connections and inferences on their own, and eventually feel secure enough in their abilities to carry over to other curriculum areas. I will serve only as a guide and give credence to their theories about the poems.
I hope to prove to these students that they can trust their instincts and feelings about reading and writing poetry. I hope that these same instincts and feelings about poetry will be transferred to the work they will need to do on classroom assignments. Weaving their poetic words into the final project will enable my EDA students to develop their information problem solving abilities and higher order thinking skills. Their books will be a concrete example of how their newly woven words demonstrate increased confidence and an enhanced understanding of their own humanity.