Playing with Poems: Rules, Tools, and Games

Teaching Strategies

Something Missing: The "Four Cs".

We are all familiar with the term the "Three Rs" to represent reading, writing and arithmetic. Recent findings for preparing students in the 21 ^st Century empowers educators to broaden the "Three Rs" to add the "Four Cs', collaboration, creativity, critical thinking and communication. ³³ The "Four Cs" will be incorporated in this unit and fortunately occur naturally in art class.

During a walking tour of the Yale University campus, our guide, a rising junior, cited many times how the university was founded and progressed on the principle of collaboration. Not coincidentally, collaboration is also a fundamental piece in the Yale National Initiative (YNI) program. Acknowledging the success of both Yale and YNI, I aim to base many of the activities of this unit on the strategies of collaboration. Of the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) techniques, I intend to facilitate 'Think, Pair, Share' and a walking 'Carousel'. SIOP is a teaching method that involves several techniques to break down learning incorporating collaboration and focuses on supporting English as second language learners. To prepare the students for life, the students need to know how to work in collaborative groups that will continue to develop throughout their careers and in their families. Modeling ideal collaborative behavior for working in groups at the elementary level will help build these skills for their future.

Critical thinking will be applied through the practices of Learning Focused Strategies (LFS). LFS provides teachers and students with an end-in-mind philosophy to learning. Teachers prepare lessons by first identifying what they want students to learn. Students learn vocabulary before the lesson is presented. Students are presented with Unit and Lesson Essential Questions prior to the activities in class and reviewed daily. These questions will provide students with the knowledge of the goals and outcomes for their learning.

Students will analyze, interpret and reflect on the work of Lear and Silverstein as well as their own. Writing their own poem and drawing an illustration to further interpret the meaning will deliver the students an opportunity to be creative in this unit. The solar system unit provides a thematic focus but also will allow each child to choose what and how these parts will be combined. Communication will be incorporated in this unit, through the student sharing their imaginary journey in words and pictures.