Musical Language- Teaching Poetry Made Easy- Part 3

TEACHING POETRY- TOOLS OF THE TRADE: MUSICAL LANGUAGE

Welcome to Post #3 about using Musical Language to help students understand poetry. This is the third post in a series of posts about my journey teaching poetry to a group of 60 students composed of 4th, 5th, and 6th-grade students. If you missed the intro post to this series, click HERE and check it out.

A Review of Rhythm and Repetition

     The first week of the unit was spent introducing poetry, reading LOTS of poetry books together and individually, and doing “poetry hunts.” I am teaching poetry four days a week right now. Thursday of the previous week was when we hit Tool #1- Rhythm and Repetition. So, I spread that over two days as I was looking at my lesson plans. We spent a lot of time practicing and reviewing.

     Monday of this last week, I started on Tool #2, and I had, what I hoped was, an amazing game plan. I would use the following format. The lesson plan below is from my on-line plan book:

As a result, I decided that to ingrain it in their brains. I needed to do a review the next day and then assign a poem that would allow for practice of the previous day’s topic. We discussed the Snowflake Souffle poem, read it together, in around (works PERFECTLY for that), and then we talked about the location of all the nouns. I still find it troubling that so many of my students- all grades- can not identify a noun, I will be making a nouns review game/activity soon to help with that.

After we had examined the homework poem, we reviewed how Tool #1- Rhythm (beat and repetition) is vital to poetry. Then, I modeled a poem for them that included repetition  I am FAR, FAR from a poet, but it was fun to share an example with the class.

Mine was this:

As a class, we decided that the ending of the last two lines didn’t quite work with the rhythm and beat. We took off “snowmen” and “snow angles, ” and that seemed to help. So we decided on this:

Then I asked the students to write a poem with rhythm and beat about winter. I thought some of them were going to have a heart-attack. But, after I quieted the terror and whining, they settled down and started to write.  Here a few of the students’ poems:

 

I had several students share their work with the class and show it under the document camera. We were able to talk about poetic form, rhythm, and beat. It was a great discussion tool, and many students found that they had an inner poet they didn’t know existed.

 

I was excited to teach Part A of this tool- Musical Language. It has three parts that will be separate posts. Part A is Onomatopoeia. This is such a FUN, FUN, FUN tool for any writing, not just poetry. Thankfully, The Write Genre book had some fun ideas. However, a majority of my lesson came from a unit I had purchased on Teachers Pay Teachers from the Peanut Gallery. Teaching Onomatopoeia: Creative Activities for the Classroom (Common Core) is totally worth the $5!

Regardless of what you use, you will want to do many activities to get the kids excited. This lesson by FAR had the most participation. The kids loved making all the “sound effects” that came with the activities. We used one of the pages from the above kit as part of their homework, Onomatopoeia Brainstorm. The students were put in groups for a few minutes to get started, and then they were to finish at home. I told them they would want to finish their assignment because they would need it for tomorrow’s poem writing.

We again ended by getting out all the poetry books and searching for examples. The kids LOVED sharing the little snippets they found.

 

As class ended, I went over their assigned homework poem. I choose, “Youth, I Do Adore Thee!” from William Shakespeare. Of course, the students thought it was an odd choice, but the strange rhythm and the obvious repetition made it an easy choice. So ended another success class session about poetry.

WAHOO! I am LOVING this unit.

Check back soon for the next post in the series. I will be sharing my lesson Tool #2- Musical Language Part B- Invented Words.

Cheers!

-MrHughes

~Post #4 Coming Soon~

 

Please Note: This post (and the others in the series) were the basis of my Easy Teach Poetry Unit. This unit will cover all the types of poetry found in this series in a simplified and flexible format.

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