Strategies
Teenagers in my middle school students like jokes, rhymes, songs, codes. I will teach them poems that make them laugh and think. We will read "Summer's Bounty" by May Swenson (for example, "Puppies of Hush" and "Rooms of Mush")." If they like songs and rhymes I will present "Microphone Fiend" by Eric B and Rakin where the music is hip-hop. Some of their rhymes are: ‘teen-cream,' ‘originated-complicated,' ‘y'all!-small." If the students want to invent codes, we will talk about the meaning of the word "coyotes" who charge people to come as illegal's to the United States and compare them with the meaning of the word "Conductors," who helped African Americans to reach their journey to freedom without charge. This is with the purpose of preparing the students to understand discrimination, slavery, segregation, which Hispanic and Latinos suffered when Spaniards arrived America in the fifteenth century and were sometimes slaved along with African Americans.
I want them to look around and find examples of poetry in their experiences. I know that they experience things intensely. They must be trained to look at words and see their hearts reflected on Pablo Neruda's love poems, the splendor moment of identification. This is poetry! Many examples exist like this, that we can use in class to stimulate their creative expressions in the 45 minute part of the block period dedicated to literary Terms.
I will teach a literary term every day as part of my routine for 20 minutes or more if necessary. It will make students to visualize the difference between verse and prose, I have to draw two pages with this distinction. If I am going to teach about imagery I will take the students outside the classroom and close their eyes and imagine the sounds they hear, or smell the air. They do not have to memorize the terminology but have a notion of those literary terms for the communicative life.
From a selection of poems copied on transparencies, the students will extract all possible connections, relations with history, main idea, and most of all, literary terms carefully registered in what will become a portfolio, where students can look up literary information needed in the future. They will read classical American poets and poems suggested by the students; poems in which students identify what they have been taught.
The poetry unit I develop will fit into the literary terms' period during the first 45 minutes of the 90 minute block of ESL. Every day I will give an example, and background information, followed with a discussion: Then the students will be assigned two more examples as homework. Also, in the part of the routine for reading, while they read they are encouraged to identify the literary terms learned in class.
During the past school year, I discovered the students' examples are dark, pessimistic, and dreary overall. Their work mirrors unhappiness. They seldom come with positive, lyrical or melodious words to express themselves in written or oral work.
"The Unknown Voice of my Students" unit develops by finding 45 positive, optimistic, gracious, hilarious poems that will offer students 45 literary/poetic terms illustrated with examples of acclaimed, actual or classical poems as part of the daily resource instruction. One by one the literary/poetic terms, with examples, will be taught as a method in order to extend the students' ability to express funny feelings, big smiles, positive explanations, show illusions and emotions. Hopefully this will help to inspire the writing of their poems!
Instruction will be comprised of some techniques developed by Writers in the Schools (WITS) to pull creative thoughts and expressions from school age youngsters. (Fortunately, Houston has a local WITS group active and available to schools through United Way with offices at the University of Houston). Some of the WITS developed creative techniques can provide me with quick guided practice in writing to express emotions, truths, purity, dimensions, quality of life, assurances of nature and the natural setting, color, music, home life, childhood, stages of life, generations in families, especially including the elderly and many other recognized stages and experiences of life such as births, deaths, weddings, baptisms, birthdays, graduations and re-unions with love ones. We will constantly listen to and read from three websites http://www.afropoets.net/nikkigiovanni.html, http://www.math.buffalo.edu, or http://browseinside.harpercollins.com where you find the beautiful title "Paint Me Like I Am: Teen Poems" from Writers Corps by Richard Newirth and Bill Aguado, and Nikki Giovanni's poems, point of study in class.
We will research and select suitable poems to use as examples showing use of specific literary terms. This, in effect, will elevate the phonics study and word usage in the ESL classes. The students will perform better every day with accumulative knowledge of literary terms paired with poems, word roots, and cognates, stimulating better word usage and selection of words.
Though I am not responsible for students' state of happiness, I do want to give them the opportunity to experience some light-hearted, happy, rhythmical and uplifting age-appropriate poetry. This is a purpose-filled effort because my ESL students are monetarily poor. I want to enrich their lives and spark an inner light of excitement with words, with the sound of words - to show students a positive side of their lives offered through "The Unknown Voice of my Students."
As their teacher, I am going to listen to and enjoy everything they say as interpretations of the literary selection. I will encourage students to collect poems they found, they know, they create, or heard in their journals; perhaps poems that were told around open fires in their native countries, in their childhood, as games on the playground, or in their homes. This will help them to transform experiences into poetry, or poetry into experiences. It will be interesting because poetry might be the optimistic way for them to appreciate the opportunity to study, to read, and to write in their new language.
I will encourage the students to open a section of their notebooks as their opinion place — to relate their feelings, surprises, and personal questions inspired by the poems. Also, they can talk to me about experiences behind the poem, or the poem that opened the door to a new experience..
Before closing this section, I want to remark the importance of hearing the inner-voice. Sometimes students have it but, they never interact or do not know that they possess it. The math problem that I will dictate hoping that everyone pays attention is a simple way to separate body as medium and thought as inner-voice. Your body, your hand writes but your inner-voice guides you and tells you when to carry a number to the other digit. I am sure that drawing is another way to see what's inside their imagination but, inner-voice is not a literary term but it is important for the purpose of this curriculum to expose various ways to say the same thing through the use of literary devices.
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