Poetry Alive! Grabbing Young Readers via the Lyrical Voice
Waltrina D. Kirkland-Mullins
Your feedback is important to us!
After viewing our curriculum units, please take a few minutes to help us understand how the units, which were created by public school teachers, may be useful to others.
Conclusion
Through mime and role play, coupled with interactive writing activities, my young learners embraced poetry and made meaningful text-to-self-to-world connections. My young learners tapped into the kinesthetic, tactile, and audio-visual experience, making the learning experience both engaging and empowering. My third and fourth-grade after school students grasped that writing is often steeped in personal experiences embraced by the author. By delving into our poetry selections, students responded to engaging questions through which they experienced the author's voice. Each reading selection opened windows for my students to view, embrace, and identify the author's craft: Students were eager to share their collective mimed interpretations and individual poetic creations. Equally important, my children embraced and applauded one another because of being given freedom to immerse themselves in literature through the use of creative, collaborative effort. The activities proved engaging, social-developmentally empowering, and are surely worth replicating. Experiment with the four poems contained within this unit and other poetic works. Give your young learners artistic freedom to explore them. By so doing, you will lay the foundation for a love of literature and writing literature by way of the poetic voice to be embraced by young learners for a lifetime!
