Teaching Poetry
The background information about the poems and poets will be used to help activate prior knowledge. Heard says "Kids need to know what poetry looks like and see how a poet uses the white spaces on the page to create rhyme, rhythm, emphasis, de-emphasis, shape, flow, pauses and stops" 7. When the teacher models lessons for the poems we should ensure the students have individual copies so they can observe the aforementioned concepts. She also talks about how she shares with the students the problems she had with the reading so she had to read it multiple times. When we read in class we are going to use a color coding system so students notice how their knowledge grows after they have read the text more than one time. Which tends to be a problem for some students because, they think that after one reading they will be able to complete all activities and assignments for the text. They fail to realize that even the most proficient readers read text multiple times in an effort to comprehend the message. So yes, students have read the text using their eyes to look at the words but that doesn't always mean they comprehended the text.
When we chose poems for the students we need to tell them why we picked the poem. Let students point out things they noticed about the poems and simultaneously making a list that we can add to throughout the school year. To hook the students into reading poems we should ask questions to help relate to their experience. For example, Who remembers…? Who has ever….? Who has seen…? Who has read…? Who wonders about….? I should share how I relate to the experience and most importantly provide background information about a person, place, event, painting, historical period, novel, or myth alluded in the poem. Then we should start a discussion about the poets' life, pictures, and other works of literature. Although some literary teachers abandon the line by line analysis I would like to invite my students to walk inside the text instead with the hopes of getting creative responses.
Before my students can write poetry I want them to learn how to read and understand poetry for what it does. It helps express feelings and emotions that other genres can't. It phrases things that are difficult. It changes the way we look, listen, talk, and touch one another's lives. It changes every time you read it. In an effort to ensure my students read the poems and don't just look at the words I am going to teach my students how to use metacognitive strategies. My students will be able to use these strategies not only for this unit but they will be able to duplicate them across all areas of content.
Metacognitive strategies are when you listen to the voice in your mind that speaks while you read. When I was a child I grew up reading so I worked on that skill for a long time. Meanwhile a lot of my students don't practice reading when they go home they read for a class assignment and that's it they don't practice how to monitor for meaning. They know when they don't know but they don't know what to do about it. Additionally they know how to make surface connections to poems but they do not know how to make connections to work they have never been exposed to. That is where I have help build a bridge to help them make the connections by frontloading information. Once the information is frontloaded they should be able to ask higher order thinking questions before, during and after reading to gain more insight about the text. While we are reading we need to determine what is and is not important information. Often children retain information solely for multiple choice test purposes. During this unit we will assess knowledge in a variety of different ways. Some knowledge will be gained from making inferences. My students have trouble making inferences because they haven't successfully practiced pre reading strategies. Another strategy we will use is imagery. At times I will ask the students to close their eyes and ask them to listen to the words and share what they see. So after students monitor what they have read we will make connections, ask questions, determine importance, use images we will evaluate everything by combining the text and sources. I want to improve my practice of the comprehension for the students I want the instruction to target/focus on thinking that happens before, during and after reading.
Summary
I realize it is ambitious to think that teaching a 35 day poetry unit will solve students reading weaknesses. However the poems were chosen because the topics will be interesting to students. Picking text of interest will hopefully spark their curiosity about the different topics to intrinsically encourage them to read independently and use the selected strategies across the content. This unit is intended for middle school language arts and special education classes.
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