Strategies
I have been told that the best way to have students understand poetry is to have them write poetry. Therefore, I will start this unit in English class with an introduction to poetry: what is poetry? We will cover types of poetry, reading poetry and writing poetry.
At a glance, poetry in all its forms and styles is a way of expressing one's feelings, thoughts and emotions. It uses colorful language that creates an atmosphere or suspends you in a moment of time, so that you too can experience what the author is saying. This is one of the reasons I thought it would be a perfect form of expression for teaching History. Poetry through the years has recorded history vividly. It tends to see history through the lives of individuals, sharing their mood and state of mind.
I would like to find out what my students know or don't about poetry. I will ask them to spend five minutes to respond to the following journal prompts: Poetry is…, The subject(s) or theme(s) of poetry are…, and I think poetry is? After posing the same question to fellow teachers and friends I received an array of answers. Consensuses of their response are: Poetry is music, the tempos and tones of life. It is the human voice singing joys, pain and grief. It is the voice of dance. Poetry is language, its structure, grammar, syntax, and the origin of thought. It is expression through metaphor and the rhythm of persuasion. Poetry is pictures painted with words. Poetry is seeing and noticing nature and all that lives in it up close and personal. It is looking at the universe, microscopic and vast. Poetry is the connection between reason and emotion; it helps us think and validates feelings. It calls for the imagination and demands an answer. Poetry is memories of the human race, the record of our experience through time. It gives life to dates and eras, and tells the reality of war, events and historical movements. Poetry asks the questions needed for spiritual journeys. Poetry is the universal voice, the human spirit calling across all boundaries. Through it we learn about others and ourselves.
We will then create a list of some responses, which in and of themselves will stimulate a lively discussion on their conflicting views. I will introduces types of poetry and discuss the language used that makes them descriptive, such as, imagery, metaphors, similes, allusions, conceits, paradoxes, and symbols.
Students will be asked to focus on a subject or a word and write about how it makes them feel. Since this unit is not a course in poetry but instead uses poetry to teach content, we will not concentrate on form, but free verse.
By way of introduction, we will look at approximately three poems concerning the same social issue and discuss them. I have chosen three poems that share the same theme: "homelessness". We will read and discuss the poems. I will instruct the students to: read each of the poems and decide if the authors were talking about the same thing, identify the theme, circle the word in each poem that made them think they all had the same theme. Finally, I will ask them to use the homelessness poems as an example and write a poem with "peer pressure" as the theme. To think about a time when they were, or witness someone else under peer pressure to do something that they normally would not do. The students will write a free verse poem expressing their feelings about the topic.
The remainder of the unit will be integrated into the social studies curriculum.
The curriculum is an exploratory survey of United States History from pre – Colombian times until the present. As each era that is covered in this unit is being taught, I will introduce the relevant Black History through poetry. We will discuss poems to experience a vivid account of what it was like to be an African American, present at those designated times in history.
In addition to any other activities in this unit the students will keep a journal to complete a specific summary analysis of each poem read. The format can be found in lesson one.
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