Activities
Week 1: Elements of Poetry
The activities will follow in a sequential order to allow students to better grasplearning the important skills of poetry. The first week of the lesson, the objective is to have students identify the structural elements of poetry. Students will begin to understand that poetry involves rhythms, verse, stanza, line, couplet, rhyme, alliteration, and figurative language. In order to learn structural elements, students will become familiar with key vocabulary words. For the first couple of days, 30 minutes a day, vocabulary words will be displayed and labeled on a poem as a model for students to use as visual aid. After the third day, students will begin to dissect a poem to find the elements of a poem. Students will be asked how they know a poem looks like a poem. What are the elements of a poem? I will model how to identify the elements of a poem. As mentioned, nursery rhymes, Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein will be used to teach the elements of poetry. Students will work in groups and independently daily during the activities for reinforcement. Assessment will be given at the end of the first week. The assessment will be in a written format where students will have to identify and label the elements of poetry. As an extension, students can take a multiple choice assessment as well to ensure consistency of the retention.
In addition to the first week’s activity, the class will invite a local poet, Orlando White, who is an instructor at the local college, to give a demonstration of what poetry is. He will reinforce how poems are written and discuss the components of a poem. He will also elaborate on how he became a poet himself, what got him interested in writing poems. He could share some insights on what makes a poem a poem, as well as discuss the forms of poems.
Week 2: Comprehension of Poetry
The second week of learning about poetry involves comprehension. The objective of the lesson is to analyze and dissect the poems by lines or stanza. Students will be introduced to poems written by Sherman Alexie, Orlando White, Luci Tapohanso, Shonto Begay, and Nancy Bo Flood. Students will be involved in highlighting key words to analyze the meaning of a line or stanza. There will be group discussion or think, pair share. One of the strategies to incorporate in this activity is to provide background knowledge about the poem and go over vocabulary used in the poem. The students will be involved in sharing and discussion. Students will also sequence the order of the parts in the poem to help with comprehension. Another activity in helping with comprehension is to use graphic organizer to analyze the poem. Students will be given a form to fill out to analyze a poem. The assessment for this activity will be to ask or answer questions about a poem, such as the following questions; in the first stanza, what is the message or main idea of the poem? Who is the character? The questions should bring out aspects of the poems. Appropriate questions might be: what traits does a speaker or character have? What is the grandmother like? The last part of this activity will be to create an imaginary picture of the poem. Students will draw their interpretation of the poems as they read. The purpose of the activity is to understand what the poem is conveying to the audience.
Week 3: Writing a Poem
The third week of the unit involves students writing a poem. The students’ cultural familiarity with an interest in what they have been reading will make them more active and interested in writing poems. Students will select words and phrases to create a collective class poem, which they will then turn into a performance. This lesson helps students to refer to the text they are reading in a different medium and setting. This activity makes students more insightful readers and helps develop creativity in thinking and writing. Students will write simple types of poetry using rhyming and alliteration. Another form is the acrostic. Students will use their names, parent’s name, or an alphabetical sequence to write an acrostic poem. Another form of poetry that the students will be exposed to is Haiku. The poems written will be culturally relevant. When students have composed the poems, they will be displayed and shared as a part of our reading collection.
Comments: