We're knee deep in metaphors around here. The personification trips my students on their way to their seats. It's poetry unit time in English 2. To say I love poetry would be a grave understatement. At 18 I was memorizing "When You Are Old" by Yeats, by 21 my bookshelf bowed with collections of Dickinson and Rossetti and Browning, and at 24 my soon-to-be-husband was proposing with poems laced together with dancing ribbon. He knew the literal path to my heart. My stacks of journals overflow with favorite lines from Collins and Stafford juxtaposed with my own lame odes to Mountain Dew written during college science lectures. When my students directly and repetitively complain about poetry, I feel as if I've failed them. "Who ruined it for you?" I ask, but they can give no answer. It's like they were born with a visceral hatred. My zealous enthusiasm mostly meets exaggerated eye rolls. Through poem and activity selection, I work hard to engage students with poems. And I celebrate BIG TIME when they have an a-ha moment of understanding. Today we took a break from the reading and annotating and discussing and instead picked up some butcher paper and markers. We illustrated poems describing specific memories. This was a simple small group activity that took one class period. Students read a simple assigned poem, discussed the descriptive memory, and then worked together to create an accurate illustration based on the images of the poem. At the end of class, each group presented their illustration and read their poem to the class. We briefly discussed the images conveyed and the emotions wrapped up in the memories. Finally, each student turned in an exit card listing one thing they learned through this activity. Their responses proved the effectiveness of visualizing these memory-based poems.
"What I learned is that seeing a visual helps a lot instead of thinking about it." -B.J. (I don't think he realized that the visual WAS thinking. MY little secret...) "It is a lot easier to understand a poem if you draw out what it says." -J.C. "I learned that if you visualize it, it is easier to understand." -E.D. What are some of your favorite ways to engage students with poetry? I would love to learn new strategies!
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September 2020
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