Classroom Activities
1) After I have introduced the vocabulary associated with the word "sonnet" and given students examples of sonnets to look at and identify the different parts of, I will give them examples to sort through. Students will behave like detectives when investigating the poems, identifying what characteristics they have that make them sonnets. I will find poems (both sonnets and non-sonnets) that are appropriate to the reading level of my students so that they can read the poems and use the definition of a sonnet to determine whether each one is a sonnet or not, and I will make them defend their decisions before the class or a group of their peers. One of the main characteristics of a sonnet is that it has fourteen lines. Integrating math into poetry, students will be able to count the number of lines in a poem. They will quickly be able to determine whether a poem has fourteen lines. In deciding whether their poem is or isn't a sonnet, they need to be able to justify their decision beyond how many lines the poem has. For purposes of this "discovery" I will mostly give them poems that have fourteen lines, with a few poems that have more or less so that students can have a few "givens."
I will model for students how to identify the rhyme scheme of a poem. Integrating the use of math manipulatives, students will create a pattern aligning to the end rhyme of the poem to show the rhyme scheme. We have snap cubes (sometimes also known as pop cubes or unifix cubes). These are cubes that come in a variety of colors and are used to group and count in math. Students can look at the words at the end of each line of a poem and lay out the corresponding colored cube so that words that rhyme will have the same color. Then students will translate this into the vocabulary that is used when studying poetry by identifying the rhyme scheme as abab or abba, etc. One of the poems students will have to identify and demonstrate to be a sonnet is Shakespeare's Sonnet Number 12. After reading the sonnet in a group (sounding out words they do not know), they will begin to discuss what characteristics make it a sonnet. They will count to see how many lines it has to verify that it has fourteen. They will look at the rhyme scheme, first using color cubes then translating the cubes into letters. For example, students would line up cubes like: red-white-red-white blue-green-blue-green yellow-purple-yellow-purple black-black. Then they will write abab cdcd efef gg. As students examine the end rhyme of the poem, they are identifying a pattern, which makes a connection to math.
Students will repeat this step with other poems they encounter during this activity. For the purpose of identifying whether or not a poem can be defined as a sonnet, it is not yet necessary for the students to be able to fluently read or understand the poem. It would be helpful for them to hear the poem being read so that they can be sure of the correct pronunciation of words, particularly the last word in each line. This can be done by the teacher, or there are resources online that can supply auditory recordings of poems. YouTube has numerous authors who recite their poems. 2 3 Other poems that can be used for this activity can include: "The Restoration" by Robert Lowell, most of the sonnets by William Shakespeare (I recommend quickly reviewing them for the appropriateness of the content for your age-level of students), "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden, "How Soon Hath Time" by John Milton, "When I Consider How My Light Is Spent" by John Milton, "Learning to Write a Sonnet" by Denise Rogers, "After Turkey Day" by Denise Rogers, "My Version of William Shakespeare's Sonnet Number Twelve" by April Halprin Wayland, "For the Anniversary of My Death" by W.S. Merwin, "The Oven Bird" by Robert Frost, "A Sport Sonnet," by Rachel S., and any of the sonnets from "Children's Sonnets by Scott Ennis" available online 2 4. Some of these poems will lead to a further discussion of rhyme scheme. These are just some examples of poems that can be used for this activity. I would have students work in pairs or groups of three to read the poem, count the lines, and identify the rhyme scheme. Students will choose one of the poems they've justified, either positively or negatively, as a sonnet and share with the class their reasoning. While they do this I will project their poem on the board so the other students will have a visual to reference while they are listening to the justification.
2) Students will learn how to read adult poems and interpret their meaning. This activity can be replicated with any poem that is read, but I'm going to illustrate the various steps that can be done to help students understand the meaning of poems by using Shakespeare's Number Twelve. It is important for students to have a copy of the poem in their possession so they can connect the words visually and auditorily. I can either read the poem or play the YouTube recording. After a first read I will have students turn and talk to a neighbor about what they think the poem means. Students can be very successful at doing this because they can choose whether or not to discuss the whole poem or only a part of the poem that they understand. This removes the excuse, "I don't get it," that one often hears from students of any age. Within each poem there is at least one thing students can interpret and understand. This virtual certainty may need to be conveyed to them reassuringly at the beginning of the year. Students can pick out words or phrases that they know or are familiar with, and then as a class we can piece together things that as a group they still do not know or understand. Using Shakespeare's Sonnet Number Twelve towards the beginning of the year, I would explicitly teach students to look for words they know and create an image in their mind to accompany those words.
Using a think aloud strategy with Sonnet Number Twelve, I would say, "In the first line I can picture a big clock that is making noise. It reminds me of a clock that is chiming so I can count the chimes to know what time it is. I'm not sure how a day can be brave or what hideous means, but when I hear the words 'day sunk in night' I'm picturing the sun sinking in the sky and the world becoming dark." My students can talk about times and experiences when they showed bravery and they can illustrate "hideous" in order to help make a connection to the lines of the poem. If I continue to model for students my own think aloud strategies, and pause to give them an opportunity to try and share, they will begin to feel confident and successful at reading not only poems but other forms of text that have difficult words and ideas.
I will continue to model how to understand the poem by wondering what information there is about the poet William Shakespeare. I will model for students looking in books. There is biographical information about him in Poetry for Young Children: William Shakespeare, a book that features his poems, and I will also model for students how to research him doing an internet search, so that they know how to use a variety of resources to gather information. It is important for students to search for biographical information that they can read and understand (and that does not contain content inappropriate to their young minds). This step can be repeated to learn information about most poets. William Shakespeare was one of the "best playwrights of all time." He was born in 1564 and he went to school. He married when he was eighteen and had three children. After the plague caused theaters to shut down, he began to write lyric poetry, and is well known for his sonnets—which are now widely known as Shakespearean or English sonnets. After the plague passed, the theater reopened in 1594 and Shakespeare resumed his career writing plays. 2 5 Together the class will note information about him on the board and create a visual representation of our ideas, and then we will read the poem again and students will have the opportunity to make any connections they can find between the poem and information they have gathered about his life or other plays or poems that he wrote. One of the things knowing this information will contribute to is that students will come to understand why the poem contains the language that it does because it was written in that particular time period. We will also pull down the world map to see where Shakespeare lived and worked. Additionally, children can be led to discover the idea that Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays and poems, and wanted his work to withstand the test of time. This is particularly relevant to Sonnet Number Twelve which suggests that memory can be perpetuated by having children but implicitly develops the theme of many later sonnets in the cycle, which is that poetry itself can perpetuate memory. This poem would be particularly relevant to study during our Life Cycles unit in science, as students are learning about their own life cycle and how one reproduces and also dies, which is touched upon in the poem as well.
3) It is important to give students the opportunity to write a various kinds of poem. Another genre I'm going to introduce them to is the Poem of Address, where the author is speaking to another person or an object. William Carlos Williams's poem, "This Is Just to Say" is an example of this type of poem. The speaker apologizes for eating plums that his wife had perhaps left in the refrigerator for another occasion and describes the sensation he had while doing it. One of the first things students will notice about this poem is that it lacks rhyme scheme. This poem is in free verse, and will lend itself to students seeing poetry as formally flexible, not just something that has rhyme. Students should be familiar with the words and vocabulary used in the poem, and in preparation for this lesson, I may purchase plums to cut up for the students so that they can taste what the speaker describes in the poem. The author, William Carlos Williams, was born in 1883 and died in 1963. He was from Rutherford, NJ and was a pediatrician, poet, and Pulitzer Prize winner. "He is noted for making the ordinary appear extraordinary through clear and discrete imagery." 2 6
Students will learn to read poems and respond to them in different ways. I will read this poem aloud, modeling for the students how it is read. We will discuss any ideas or questions they may have about the poem and then we will perform an echo read, where I read a line and they repeat it back to me, and then a choral read, where we all read the same words at the same time. Students can continue to practice reading it on their own. The Williams poem is great because it is short and easy to memorize. They will be able to creatively respond to it. As a class we will discuss who the speaker of the poem is, and whom the speaker is writing to. Then students can choose whether to continue the poem, write a response to the poem, or write their own "This Is Just to Say" poem revealing something that they've done and need to confess to. For students who are struggling to get started with their writing, we can brainstorm responses or things they can write together as a class. This gives students a way to get their creative minds going so they can be successful getting started.
We will look at the stanza form in "This Is Just to Say." The lines are short and grouped together into four line stanzas. Students will be able to use this format to write their own poems. I want my students to be able to make choices in writing their poems, but I also want them to be able to write in a variety of forms inspired by poems they read. Students will work in close proximity with their peers so they can ask questions and bounce ideas off each other as needed. They can also share what they've written so far and get immediate feedback. Again, sharing ideas is something that needs to be taught in advance to second grade students, and reviewed before children try their hand at writing poems. Expectations should be established for how to share ideas and respond to what others write.
Teaching poetry to young people has many valuable purposes. Poems can be used to introduce new vocabulary and forms as well as help beginning readers read more fluently and learn how to associate word patterns while integrating mathematical patterns. Poetry encourages students to get in touch with their emotions. Poems can be used to facilitate comprehension. But, the most important benefit students can receive from this unit is to enjoy reading, especially reading poetry. Reading and reciting poems should be fun for my students. They should enjoy it so much, and it should build such a strong foundation in language arts, that benefit for their entire educational careers, and develop interpretive strategies that are valuable in living their lives.
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