Overview
Imagine children on a playground. The rhythmic lapping of a jump rope marks a steady beat as the children giggle, swaying to and fro, each child anxiously awaiting her name to be called. All the while the chant rises, ‘Down in the valley where the green grass grows. There sat she sat as sweet as a rose.'
Save for the sound of your voice if you read the passage aloud, sound does not physically exist in this memory, yet you can hear the lap, lap, lapping of the rope and the pattern created within the chant. The focus of this unit is the exploration of that phenomenon - auditory imagery. The unit was developed to help students make a connection between what words mean, how the words sound, and how the two support one another within poetry.
The poems referenced in this unit were chosen for the over-arching theme of perseverance that each supports - either because the poet has overcome adversity, the poem's content implies such, or because of the consistent pattern of sound that ripples through the poem. Students will explore the elements of sound in the three categories of poetry, lyrical, narrative, and dramatic, through reading, listening, analyzing, writing, and peer-response activities.
This stand-alone course was designed for seventh and eighth grade students in the Humanities Department of the Pittsburgh Public Schools gifted education program. These students have extremely high cognitive abilities and need strength-based enrichment activities in addition to what they receive in the mainstream curriculum. Each student attends the program one day per week. The students have the rare, college-like opportunity to choose the courses they will take each semester. Each course meets for 1.5 hours per week over a 16-week semester.
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