Love and Politics in the Sonnet

Introduction and Objectives

Are you friends with Dr. Seuss and The Cat in the Hat? Do you know Peggy Ann McKay who "cannot go to school today"? She is the main character in Shel Silverstein's poem, "Sick." ¹ Have you needed to make a decision in your life and "taken the road less traveled by and made all the difference," as modeled by Robert Frost in his poem "The Road Not Taken"?. ² While you sit there and read this now, is your head spinning with other poems that you can quickly recall or recite? What is your favorite? What images or events in your life immediately conjure up a poem that you heard, read, or learned, knowing that that poem puts a smile in your heart? Even poems that address subjects or events that are disturbing still please us for having encountered them and read them to learn something new. Wouldn't it be great to share this same joy with our children? Don't our students deserve to know the great poetry that has been part of our educational history—and even poems that have not? Poetry can have a significant connection to their lives, situations, or the subjects they are studying.

This unit will make poetry connect with everything in my curriculum, but that in itself is not new for me. I currently use poems or songs to introduce different themes and topics that my students study and learn in second grade; but beyond this mediatory function I will also make poetry a curricular topic: I will create a space in my curriculum for my students to learn about the format of poetry, how to read it and how to write it. Only then will I have students write their sonnets in response to something they are learning in a different content area. I believe they can tie the vocabulary of second grade science, social studies, or language arts into their poems to give them purpose and meaning in the context of another discipline they are studying. This will allow the students to realize that poetry is not just about writing, it's also about understanding, and can be used at one and the same time to reinforce what they know and help them learn more.

Poems allow us to remember things. For instance, the rhyme "30 days Hath September, April, June, and November" is quickly recalled anytime I'm trying to figure out how many days there are in a given month. The verses "In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue" is needed to help me remember what year Columbus came to America. It is important to foster an enthusiasm in my students for reading and writing in a variety of genres and poetry helps us to understand our lives, our culture, and our history. This curriculum unit will allow my students to reference a variety of poems and types of poetry, including the format of sonnets. This curriculum unit is being developed while I'm participating in the seminar "Love and Politics in the Sonnet" offered by Paul H. Fry, Professor of English, at the Yale National Initiative. As a result of what I have learned I will teach my students what a sonnet is and how poems can be categorized as sonnets. Once they know what makes a sonnet, I will give them a chance to explore the rhyme scheme of sonnets, integrating the subjects of reading and math as my students identify and reason about the end patterns in the sonnets they read. Students will have access to a variety of poems that are appropriate to their individual reading levels so that this exercise will be possible for each of them.

Students will listen to, read, and recite poems. This objective serves two purposes. These poems will serve as mentor texts for the poems they are going to write around a topic we are studying in school, integrating the vocabulary they need to learn into their poem as a means of better understanding that topic. This exercise will also help increase the students' fluency, expression, and the rate at which they read and acquire words. I want to find poems that evoke a variety of cultures and time periods and styles, all related to a topic or idea with which my students can make a connection, formulating thoughts about an idea that is new to them.

Students will be responsible for comprehending poems. They will not just learn how to read the words of a poem, but also to interpret its meaning. Students will learn how things may look and sound one way in figurative language but mean something else. They will see why interpretation is important. Learning to read poems fluently will also build their capacity for expressiveness when reciting the poems. Students will use strategies to understand the vocabulary by breaking words apart, looking them up in a dictionary, or asking a friend to help. For some poems they will find out what they can about the author, and perhaps the circumstances of its composition. Students will develop researching skills by doing this.

The skills of reading expressively, understanding new vocabulary, and researching the history of a literary piece are all important to the foundation of language arts and will be accessible to the students throughout their study of all modes of writing, not just poetry. One significant help the students will have access to is the series of books, Poetry for Young People, that I have readily available for them to use in my classroom. These books already perform the research I have mentioned for the students, and students can use it as a model for finding out about poems from other sources. The illustrative pictures in Poetry for Young People will also help them to interpret the meaning of the poems.

This curriculum unit is being designed for second graders, but could be modified to be used by other elementary grades. I am a second grade teacher in a self-contained classroom in a large suburban public school in the Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools district. My school fosters strong parental involvement and participates in the Basic School philosophy that prioritizes "The School as Community, Commitment to Character, Climate for Learning, and Curriculum with Coherence" (Boyer 1995) ³. These priorities promote themed units with integrated connections across the subjects of math, science, social studies, and language arts. They also encourage developing and using relevant and rigorous curriculum for students. As we implement the national Common Core standards, prior knowledge of students together with observations and assessments inform instruction in the classroom. Student assessments include district mandated quarterly tests in the subjects of reading, writing, and math, self-reflection, portfolios, grade level pre- and post-unit assessment, formative and summative assessment, and classroom observations. In the classroom and at the school, students have access to numerous technologies including computers with internet and instructional software, calculators, overhead and data projectors, TV, VCR/DVD player, CD player, and cassette players. We have a mobile (students frequently come and leave) student population that averages over 900 students and there is an approximately one to twenty-three teacher to student ratio on my grade level. The student population of my school includes 59.6% African American, 16.5% Caucasian, 11.3% Hispanic, 4.9% Asian, and 6.9% multiracial. 60% of our students meet the state's poverty level. 63% of our 2010-2011 students passed the state's end-of-grade test. One of my roles as an elementary school teacher is to find and make connections across the curriculum content areas. I will be engaging in this process throughout the curriculum unit by using poems with content related to the various themes and topics I teach across the content areas of reading, writing, science, social studies, and math. Within the framework of the language arts curriculum, students will be reading, writing, speaking, and listening when they engage with the poetry we are learning in the classroom.

It is most important for students to learn and study poetry as part of a rigorous curriculum. Poetry is motivating. It comes in so many forms and structures, and students can learn and remember a lot about different cultures and time periods from reading poems and learning about the context in which they were written. In the British newspaper, The Telegraph, columnist Boris Johnson argues that children should learn and recite poetry. As he says,

When you learn a good poem, you make a good friend. You have a voice that will pop up in your head, whenever you want it, and say something beautiful and consoling and true. A poem can keep you going when you are driving on a lonely motorway, or when you are trapped on some freezing ledge in the Alps, or when you are engaged in any kind of arduous and repetitive physical activity, and need to keep concentration. When some disaster overwhelms you, or when you are feeling unusually cheerful – or when you are experiencing any human feeling whatever – it is amazing how often some line or phrase will swim to the surface and help to articulate your emotions, to intensify them or to console. ⁴

This is a sentiment that I echo. When I'm searching for the right words to say to express my emotions during different situations, I am frequently able to reference a poem that I've learned or heard at one point in my life. Poems align with all types of emotions or circumstances; they are not limited to just one or two specific situations.

Amsco, an Educational Publishing Company, sets forth five reasons for why teachers should be teaching poetry. 1. Poems are short. 2. Poetry helps students learn about word choice and build their vocabulary. 3. Poetry is a good outlet for students. 4. Poetry helps students learn to make connections to what they're reading. 5. Poetry is catchy. It sticks in your head because of the meter, rhymes, imagery, and figurative language. ⁵ These five reasons are echoed on several websites where teachers and literary professionals alike declare why it is important for children to learn poetry.

When children are introduced to something early, it can capture their attention and become more attractive to them. The capacity young children have to learn, understand, and appreciate things develops when they are introduced to things at a young age and stays with them for the rest of their lives. Giving second graders an opportunity to become experts at poetry creates in them a life-long skill and love for reading, understanding, and reciting poems. When poetry is introduced and used alongside other literary modes, students will begin to identify the important contributions it makes to their fluency as readers.