Classroom Activities
Activity #1: What Is a Poem?/Can a Sentence Be a Poem? (2 days)
Teaching Goals: Students will be able to define and apply elements of voice such as diction, detail, imagery, figurative language, and syntax
Start with a discussion of descriptive sentence writing, reminding them of elements of voice: diction, imagery, detail, figurative language, and tone. Then, distribute photographs or paintings from World War I (Google Images has a great repository of both mediums), one image per student. Have each student write a descriptive sentence to describe the image in twenty words or fewer. It might be advisable to have extra pictures so that students can exchange the image they are given for one they like better.
Next, distribute war poetry anthologies or teacher-created poetry readers around the classroom and encourage students to browse through them to find poems that they really like. Have students copy a poem or an excerpt from the poem onto unlined paper exactly as it looks in the book, mindful of line breaks, stanza breaks, indentations, and punctuation. Post the finished product on a wall in the classroom. Be aware of students who are re-writing the poem into paragraph form or as a sentence string as they may not have had much experience with what poetry looks like.
On the second day, discuss the elements of a poem: what is a poem? Look at sentence-length poems such as "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos William (1923) or "Epitaphs of War" by Rudyard Kipling (a collection of short verses published in 1922) and discuss whether these qualify as poems, why or why not. Now would be a very good time to discuss whether or not a poem has to rhyme.
Return to the sentences created by the students that used some of the images of war and have them reformat the sentence into a poem. While students might want to revise their use of poetic devices such as imagery or detail, they should not alter the length of the poem's one-sentence, twenty-word limit. Add these finished products to the classroom wall of war poetry. With permission, you might also want to have students write their one sentence poem, in poetic form, with colored chalk on school sidewalks.
Activity #2: Annotating Poetry
Teaching Goals: Students will be able to define the subject, occasion, audience, purpose, speaker, and tone of a poem (SOAPSTone technique). Students will also interpret meaning in poetry and support an interpretation of a poem with evidence from the text
It is important to model the process of annotation as you move further into the poetry unit. For this assignment, find an example of an annotated poem—the teacher can create the example, it can come from a former student's work, or it can be found online using Google images or Google Books. Begin by explaining that annotation is a way of having a conversation with the text and its author. Students should be encouraged to ask questions, pay compliments, argue a point, or seek clarification.
Next, project the image of the annotated poem to the front of the classroom using an overhead, LCD projector, or interactive whiteboard. Lead students through a discussion of what the model-writer marked up, creating a rubric of annotation to help students differentiate between taking notes that are "incomplete or too random." 56 Some teachers have found great success in providing an annotation key for their students: using an asterisk (*) for passages that demonstrate a fresh way of saying something; a question mark (?) to indicate something that does not make sense; a hashtag (#) for the bigger theme or picture. Leave this rubric and the annotation key on the board or make a poster-sized version of it for students to refer to throughout the year.
Finally, distribute a short war poem to the class—"The Soldier" by Rupert Brooke (1915) would work very well for this assignment. Have them glue the poem onto the right-hand side of their interactive notebook. Next, read the poem out loud once as the teacher, then invite several student volunteers to read the poem a second, third, and even fourth time. Students should use a highlighter or a colorful pen to mark up the poem, referring to the rubric for thoughtful suggestions of what to annotate. On the left-hand page, have students begin a SOAPSTone analysis (who is the Speaker, what is the Occasion, who is the intended Audience, what is the Subject, and what is the Tone), filling in as much as they can individually and with citable evidence before moving to a Think-Pair-Share model. Students should also create below-the-surface discussion questions that could lead to a journal activity or writing assignment.
Activity #3: The Vocabulary of Poetry
Teaching Goal: Students will be able to define and apply poetic devices including alliteration, assonance, consonance, metaphor, onomatopoeia, repetition (including anaphora and epiphora), rhyme scheme (including end rhyme, slant rhyme, and internal rhyme), simile, and theme.
Before the lesson begins, find examples of World War I poems that you enjoy. Look for poems that have strong examples of alliteration, assonance, consonance, metaphor, onomatopoeia, repetition, rhyme scheme, simile, and theme.
Print the poems, one per page with a label of the single element that the poem exemplifies. For example, tag Jessie Pope's "The Call" with the vocabulary word "repetition" and a working definition. Slip the page into a sheet protector to safeguard the pages for today's lesson and to be able to re-use for the next class period and next year.
Have the class sit in pairs or triads, one poem per group. If you printed 14 poems, you will have groups of 2-3 students. Have students copy the vocabulary word into their notebooks, then a phrase from the poem that demonstrates the concept along with a citation of the poem. End class with a discussion of their new vocabulary words or by transferring the information to poster paper around the room.
Activity #4: Writing Poetry
The great irony of most secondary school poetry units is "pupils spend a significant amount of time studying poetry written by others, but most of them write no poetry of their own." 57 This is true for most of the things we study in fiction—we read short stories, plays, and novels, but we don't assign students to write an original story, play, or novel. However, poetry is another matter entirely: imagine receiving a class set of poems to grade rather than a class set of essays.
Writing poetry might be perceived as a luxury with a "crowded examination timetable," but it is thoughtful reflection. 58 Writing poetry is expressive: "much of it is easily based on models and patterns, and the process can be quick and painless and even fun. Let's face it: writing poems is not like writing essays." 59 Poetry helped the soldier make sense of the war and can help our students make connections as well.
Throughout the unit, have students write: something as small as a haiku (5-7-5 syllables) can be an exit ticket for that day's class. This daily or weekly activity will focus students on summarization skills and reinforce the need to look for main ideas.
Longer emulation activities will help students focus on not only the voice of the poet, but their own voice as an emerging student-writer. A model poem such as Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (1917) can be the starting point for writing a poem like "Six Ways of Looking at a Soldier" or "Nine Ways of Writing about the War."
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