The Swan Family: Poetry Class Week 1

This box is a box of dreams. Inside this box are the beginnings of something I've wanted to put together for a really long time.

A poetry class.

My kids and I are part of a homeschool co-op that meets once a week. The kids get to take all sorts of cool classes offered by cool moms that have different interests and teach in different styles than I do, which I think is really beneficial to my kids, and which my kids love. I teach two classes as part of the deal. And this semester one of those classes is poetry.

I'm roughly basing my lesson plans off of the book Explore Poetry! With 25 Great Projects by Andi Diehn. But I'm not going in the order suggested, nor am I using all their material, and I am definitely supplementing with some of my own material and ideas. But, I do really like this book, and highly recommend it, because it breaks down the pieces of poetry into nice bite-sized chunks, and has some really fun ideas and activities to choose from.

So at co-op, I have about 10 students (that includes my three oldest kids) ranging in age from 7-11, but I would say the majority of them are about 9 years old. That's just a tad bit younger than my target age range for this class, but that's ok.

Really the main thing is that in order for this class to go smoothly, the kids need to be really solid readers, and decent writers; it's not spelling and grammar I care about so much as stamina for writing. If the kids don't have a confident grasp on regular reading it's going to a lot harder for them to understand how to play with words to make them do what you want them to do. And as far as writing goes, if getting a few words jotted down on a page is still a pretty hard chore, then getting through a class where you're mainly writing poetry is going to be a really hard chore and not very fun. If you were going to do these lessons one-on-one with a kid, and could be their scribe, that would work just fine. But being a scribe to 10 kids in a class would be near impossible. Anyways, just my two sense before we start.

The very first thing we did in class on day 1 was ruin a perfectly good sheet of notebook paper. Haha! I had all the kids take out their poetry notebooks and open up to the first page. I told them to scribble all over it. After a few weird looks they did it. When the pages were good and covered, I told them to go ahead and crumple up the page without ripping it out of the notebook. Then I told them to flatten it out as best the could and close their books. I told them that their poetry notebooks were a place for ideas, and unfinished things; not pretty, perfect things. I told them part of the writing process was trying something just to see how it felt, then not liking it, scribbling it out, and trying something different. Writers almost never write something the way they want it written the very first time they try. Writing is messy. Creativity is messy. And sometimes it takes a few tries, or a whole slew of tries to get the result that you want. I told them that the reason we messed up their first page is so that they would remember that the notebook wasn't a place for perfection, but a place to "take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!" as Ms Frizzle says. :) I'll be honest, I have about three kids who can't stand it and ask me every single class period if they can rip the messy page out of their notebook because they hate it. (2 of them are my boys.) I encourage them to leave it there.

The Five Senses

The next topic we discussed as a class was descriptive writing. We talked about how good writers use all five of their senses to describe things when they write, not just what they see with their eyes. In the middle of the table I put an orange, a plastic spoon, a pine cone, a wool sock, and a pile of bacon bits. In their notebooks, I had the kids write how they would describe each one of these things by sight. This might include words that would tell you about the size, shape, or color of the object. Then we went through all the other senses and used them to describe the objects on the table. (*I got the idea for this activity from our Bravewriter nature journaling class.)

Now that they'd had some practice, I had them trace their hands onto a piece of paper and write an object of some sort in the middle. I did a pine tree on mine. One of the kids in class did the ocean, one did a cat, another did a bicycle, etc. Then on each finger we wrote one of the senses. Using the area around the fingers the kids came up with words to describe their object according to the different senses. I chose to do each sense in a different color because I think it makes the visual easier, but some of the kids chose not to do it that way, and that's fine too.

Alliteration

Next we switched gears a little bit. I read them a book called Chips and Cheese and Nana's Knees What Is Alliteration? by Brian P. Cleary to introduce alliteration. The book is silly, and has funny cartoony pictures to go along with, and even though it might be a little young for them, I think it does a good job of getting the point across about what alliteration is.

We talked about how alliteration is everywhere, but one of the most recognizable forms it takes is in tongue twisters. I gave them a sheet of tongue twisters and had them get into groups to play around with them and trying to say them as fast as they could. They had a lot of fun with this. I had them glue their tongue twisters into their notebooks.

Once the laughter had died down and I was pretty sure everyone understood the concept, we talked about how alliteration wasn't only for being silly, but that famous writers and poets used it too all the time. I handed out a copy of a portion of The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, and asked the kids to go through it and circle all the examples of alliteration they could find.

Found Poems

Now that we had a couple literary tools at our belts, I wanted the kids to write poems of their own. Found poems are a really great begging poem to attempt to write, because they are really open-ended. It's hard to go wrong with a found poem. Basically, a found poem is where you find words from a variety of other places, and you bring them together to make a poem. In our case the "other places" were going to be from the pages of old magazines. I put stacks of magazines in front of the kids, and told them to cut out all the words that caught their eye. Once everyone had a pile of words in front of them, I gave them each a piece of construction paper and told them to play around with their words until they found an arrangement that suited them. I told them to keep in mind the things we'd learned today about using our senses in descriptions and about alliterations. And then I turned them loose! And they did great. I was really pleased with how their poems turned out. Here are a few examples.