Poetry

I love poetry in the classroom. It's fun. It's quick. It's easy to write!  For our poetry unit I had one rule: no rhyming. Kids can't understand this since we've all been rhymed to death from "nursery rhymes" to Dr. Seuss, to first grade "fat,cat, rat" practice.  But, in my opinion, let a kid try and rhyme all the time and all you get is a bunch of silly rhymes with no meaning.  And of course, meaning is what poetry is all about.  Getting your meaning across by choosing exactly the specific words that will do the job.  I am constantly blown away at what beautiful and clever poems kids can write when shown good poetry, technique, and then given a chance to play around with it.  My feeling when writing poetry is ...let the conventional stuff go...I love to show kids e.e. cummings poems...he never used capitals! This REALLY lets kids know you are interested in what they're trying to say and how they're fooling around with words and ideas rather than their periods and capitals. Save those for sentences!

The techniques of poetry I covered were white space, repetition, alliteration, metaphor, simile, imagery and personification.  Every day was set up in the same format: bring your writer's notebooks to the floor.  I would read a poem that I had printed on paper and cut for them to glue into their notebooks. We would read the poem, talk about what it meant first and then talk about what they noticed that the poet did in the poem. If it was a new idea I would show them the technique and then model it. Then "off you go" to give it a try.  We would end each class with a volunteer share.  As the kids wrote I would walk around and ask them how it was going, what they were trying to do as a poet...important note here...don't worry about the TOPIC...focus on the writing technique.  If someone was being brilliant with the technique I would stop the class to highlight the poet's focus. 

It is important not to go too fast here.  As I looked back through my less confident students' notebooks I did see many unfinished poems...they needed more time to  get more comfortable, process, and I had just kept going on to the next.  What I was looking for was an accumulation of techniques, not just using the one we were learning.  And I certainly was looking for finished poems in some form or another. 

Coming up next:  the model poems I used and my students' poems!

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