Writing Poetry
From the desk of Carol C…
The Common Core doesn’t directly list writing poetry as one of its standards. So why teach it if it’s not in there? “How do I tell thee? Let me count the ways.”
First of all teaching students how to write poetry requires that they understand what poetry is and how to interpret it. Both of these ideas are in the CC standards for reading. Poetry teaches the writer not to waste words, to be specific. Being specific and choosing words carefully are characteristics of good writing in any genre: narrative, informational, and opinion which are all CC standards. By nature poetry provides continuous examples of powerful and wondrous word choice. It is loaded with crafting techniques such as similes, imagery, metaphors, and words used in new and interesting ways. Poetry lends itself to in-depth discussions about the choices poets make and how those choices affect the reader. What a foundation this lays for all of the CC standards!
Now that you are ready to delve into teaching your students about writing poetry, what are the steps you need to take before you begin?
1. Read lots of poetry to yourself. If you don’t you will most likely end up with a rhyming poem about a school bell. Skipping this step keeps you from fully understanding and appreciating all types of poetry, and at the end of the unit you’ll have a stack of incomprehensible, rhyming poems. Read old poems, new poems, children’s poems, teenage poems, any kind of poems. Just read them.
2. Before you expect your students to write or understand poetry on their own, you have to read a gazillion poems to them. I usually start with a few Shel Silverstein or Jack Prelutsky poems. Then I move on to poets and poems that are favorites of mine. One poem I like to use is “The Swing” by Robert Louis Stevenson. This poem is easy to understand, and it illustrates how something ordinary, swinging, can be the subject of a poem (or a narrative). Also, the language is simple yet Stevenson takes the reader into his world of play. Other poems I use by Stevenson are “My Shadow” and “The Land of Nod”. Both of these are more difficult, but again they show the ordinary in a different light. These two poems are, also, great to use to teach word choice and imagery. “Dreams” by Langston Hughes is a metaphor as is “Fog” by Carl Sandburg. “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks is for middle or high school students and shows how a twist at the end changes the intent of the poem.
3. Always read your favorite poems. You’ve got to be as passionate as possible about what you’re reading. One of my favorites is “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allen Poe. I read it a lot to my students. I over dramatized my love for it which sparked them to read with passion. It’s not a poem most 8 year olds would love, but they sure did in my class just because they saw how strongly I felt about it. They asked for it over and over quoting lines from it often.
For the first poem that I ask my students to write, I parallel write with them. I always start with a poem about color that contains lots of vivid images in it. For inspiration I use the book by Mary O’Neill called Hailstones and Halibut Bones. I ask each child to think of any color. I do the same. Then I list everything that I can think of that are examples of that color. The color, however, should never be mentioned. As I go along I try to become more descriptive. For instance let’s say that I chose the color brown. I might start out writing “dirt, my hair, a desk”. Then I move on to ” warm mud, my grandfather’s shoes from the field, my baby sister’s eyes, my great aunt’s picture, steaming cocoa.” Then when most or all are finished with this part, I model how to choose the best images and how to put those images in an order that makes sense to them. The first poem has been written. Most likely for the next lesson or two we continue with writing poems that begin with making a list of something. Usually the topic is their choice, but I always model for them.
The objective of these first lessons is to have my class feel comfortable with poetry when they begin to write. All of them are able to choose a color, list examples of it, choose the images they like best, and put them in an order that makes sense to them. Just as importantly each child begins to use words to paint pictures and evoke emotions. How powerful is this?
Rigor is a quality of instruction that requires students to construct meaning and impose structure on situations rather than expect to find them already apparent” (Resnick, 1987, p. 44). In other words “it is the expectation that requires students to apply new learning to other disciplines and to predictable and unpredictable real-world situations” (Rigor/Relevance Framework). So many times objectives are written based on, and therefore we think in terms of, what our students will know and how they will score on an assessment. When thinking of a rigorous curriculum we need to think in terms of what our students will understand and be able to do after a lesson or unit is taught. Part of the focus of lessons should be to make sure that our students can think accurately and with clarity and can identify and consider multiple meanings and interpretations of text. Giving our students the tools to write poetry and thereby showing an understanding of it, certainly requires them to construct meaning and apply new learning to other disciplines. That sounds like rigor to me!
* For well written lesson plans and units on poetry from Read Write Think, click here. All lessons can be searched by grade level.