The Partly Successful Poetry Lesson
I stare at my daughter, mortified that the source of her crying came from my own hands.
She has just finished part three of her poetry assignment. Monday was free-writing, Tuesday she created a poem from her free-write, and today is the big “R”, revision.
Until today they have done some light revision but we’ve never used the “R” word. Last week they heard an author speak about his writing process and how his book went through five drafts before it become a published book. He shared that the process was hard on him but he had no doubt that the final draft was a much better book than his first draft.
So I couldn’t hide the “R” word anymore. But I tried to put the right spin on it.
I even started with an inspiring moment, designed to reveal that revision didn’t equal “wrong”. Based on the idea from Georgia Heard’s book The Revision Toolbox”, I brought out a geode.
“The first draft is like this geode. You definitely have something there. It’s a solid idea.”
And then I dramatically got out a hammer and we broke that small rock open to find the glimmering beauty inside.
“This is what happens when we go back to our first draft and crack open the first ideas to find the gems inside by looking at word choices, sharpening images, losing extra words. It’s not that the first draft is wrong or bad, this is just the next step to finding your poem or story.”
Inspiring, right?
I set the two halves of the geode on the desk and handed them some questions to help them think over their poem. And left the room.
Which brings us back to the sobbing child in the chair beside me.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“My poem’s not poetical anymore!” cried my 9 year old.
“What?”
“I loved my poem yesterday,” racks of sobs and broken breath continue, “but now that I’ve read those questions I don’t think my my poem’s even a poem anymore! I hate my poem,” the sobbing turns into a heavy slump upon the table.
This is when teaching stinks. All of my teaching is trial and error, which means sometimes I get it so right and sometimes I have a day like this one. I don’t mind making mistakes, but I don’t like to do them at the cost of my daughter’s creative process.
I warned them when I handed out the questions.
“I’m figuring out how to teach this to you as we go. This step of working on your poem might work great or one of you may love it or everyone may hate it. We’re just going to have to try it.”
Well, the almost eleven year old (who’s also pretty relaxed about her creative process) worked through the questions and declared, “This is fun, these questions are great, they helped a lot.”
You already know how it turned out for the other one-who, by the way, is two years younger. When the author last week said that in art, as well, the first draft is never the best, Jellybean declared he was wrong(privately, to me, later, thankfully).
“My first tries in art are always my best,” she explained.
Is it just age, is it also personality? She had written five pages of a poem and then decided it was no longer a poem!
Sure I should have seen that one coming. I should have handed her older sister the paper with questions for her poem, and allowed the younger to recite a beautiful rendition of her five page poem and call her poem done-but I didn’t. Because sometimes it’s trial and error.
The learning curve for this teacher is deep and wide, how is it for you? Have you had successes so far this year, or many nearly successful moments?
When Push Comes to Shove
(The assignment discussed in this post is from A Crow Doesn’t Need a Shadow: A Guide to Writing Poetry from Nature by Lorraine Ferra.)
One of the challenges of being the teacher is facing the sigh. The low groan. The roll of the eyes, when I announce a certain subject or assignment.
Along similar lines, it’s also difficult to watch a child struggle with a lesson and be the teacher who has to keep her on the road through the hard stuff.
By 9:30 our day had ricocheted way off track from our original school plan, punted by outside circumstances with my Dad that couldn’t be avoided. After lunch I gathered the grumpy, out-of-sorts crew (myself included) together to get started with school.
The atmosphere was not ripe for a poetry lesson. My ten year olds face looked so glum her frown was sliding off her chin like unset jello.
“We’re going to do a poem today about the weather.” I pointed to window, indicating the autumn day taking place outside.
A heave of the shoulders and then through tight teeth, “Fine.”
“First you’re going to make a list of action verbs associated with people.”
“What do you even mean!”
“Not common verbs, pick interesting ones like ‘swallow’ and ‘erase’.” Picture a lot of enthusiasm in my voice, I was attempting to transfer it with the right intonation.
“Then make another list of verbs associated with animals-”
“-I thought this was a poem about the weather!!” my 9 year old cried out, exasperated.
“It is. Just wait and see. Think of verbs like ‘pounce’ and ‘perch’.”
“It sounds hard,” my ten year old mumbled down to the floor.
Reader, this is is when it gets hard for me. I forget that struggle isn’t a thing to be avoided and the mama in me wants to do something to ease it. Especially when I’m the source of the frustration! But I knew they could get this assignment.
“You don’t have to use all of the verbs but use some of them to write a poem about the fall weather. Here’s an example by an 8 year old-
Wind
Wind nibbles
on the walls of the buildings.
When it hunts
in the forest it rubs its chin
on the trees
and wipes its mouth
on their leaves.
There was a slight lift in the frowns. I grabbed at the moment.
“Grab a sweatshirt and your notebooks and go outside.”
Reality set in, they were really going to have to do this assignment.
The cheer in my voice rose hoping to cajole their spirits up and out of the dumps.
“Here put on Daddy’s warm sweatshirt. You put on your big sister’s,” and then I added lightly, ”Guess we better have some hot chocolate in a little while since it’s cold out today.”
I admit it, that last bit was pure bribery coated in chocolate.
Turning to math with my six year old, I occassionally glanced at the girls sitting on the driveway with their notebooks.
Twenty minutes later we heard someone burst through the side door and then my ten year old appeared. Cheeks the color of gala apples, her dad’s sweatshirt hanging to her knees, and excitement buzzing around her entire body she said, “I’m finished!”
She waited. She wanted me to ask to hear the poem.
“Can I hear it?”
“Okay.”
Dramatic Pause. A rush of breath-
Sometimes the wind
is a message bearer, whispering
to the trees news of what
I do know know.
But some days the wind
is a wild cat, pouncing
on leaves and dragging
them to its lair.
Some mornings when I wake up,
the wind flies through the window
and burrows under my covers, driving
me out of bed and into my clothes.
The wind is its own person,
changing each day.
To me
the wind is alive.
She’d had that moment. That moment, determined to fail and yet looking at the wind, and giving it living breath on her page, she found out that with her own words the wind really was alive.
I tumbled into adulthood afraid of things that were hard. I didn’t want to try anything new, worried that it might take effort or might end in failure. It’s a fine line to walk as mom and teacher but when I get it just right between the “yes go do it” and the “let’s celebrate with hot chocolate” the results are worth the earlier struggle. I can see in the child a little more confidence and little less fear of the next challenge.
Just One More Poetry Resource (Okay, two)
Let me tell you about one more poetry resource, I just picked it up from the library last night.
After flipping through it, I found myself wondering why it’s not on all of the tables at the curriculum sales (I found the title during a blitz of website perusal, maybe on my eleventh link from the first poetry site I tried). With so much focus on nature study in the homeschool community, this book on writing poetry from nature can be incorporated easily into nature notebooks and field trips.
A Crow Doesn’t Need a Shadow: A Guide to Writing Poetry from Nature by Lorraine Ferra couldn’t be a better fit for our current study. We’re just starting a six week study on nature, poetry, and art, focusing on book illustrators Barbara Cooney and Beatrix Potter, reading about the life of John Muir and poet Pablo Neruda, and reading and writing some outdoor poetry.
First of all I like the layout. It’s easy to flip through the projects, with examples of each poetic assignment included in each section (written by children age 7-13), and even the illustrations make me feel like getting in touch with my natural side.
Some books are full of ideas but are hard to translate into workable assignments, but these don’t take any translating at all. I might match them up with a specific book or nature activity for the week, but the ideas themselves are straightforward.
I expect my 9 and 11 year old to understand these assignments easily, and I imagine I’ll feel compelled to write along side them.
Excerpt from the book:
To write a different kind of poem about weather, start by making a list of action words (verbs) that you usually associate with people. (Several actions verbs are listed as examples like swallows, carves, gossips, and yawns.) Make a second list of verbs you commonly associate with animals. Words such as gallops, slithers, and perches.
Decide upon some aspect of weather for your subject; then choose two or three verbs from each of your lists to start your poem. For example, if you subject is fog you might begin by describing how fog erases objects you ordinarily see or by telling where fog perches or grazes.
Example of using uncommon verbs by Tyler, age 8
Wind
Wind nibbles
on the walls
of the buildings.
When it hunts in the forest,
it rubs its chin
on the trees
and wipes its mouth
on their leaves.
(Assignment and poem excerpted from A Crow Doesn’t Need A Shadow)
The assignments in this book encourage what we’ve already begun with nature study-paying attention to the senses while outside, knowing specific names for trees and flowers to make the images in your writing strong, expressing how the sun’s warmth and the peace by the pond make you feel.
Check it out.
Another book that came home with from the library is Emily by Michael Bedard and illustrated by Barbara Cooney. A picture book peek into the life of Emily Dickinson.
With more books coming in the from the library every day, expect to hear about more treasures soon.
Resources for Teaching Poetry
Last year we really enjoyed our exploration of poetry. We tried out several poetic forms, read and copied favorite poems, and our 9 year old even won the local NPT story and illustrators contest for her collection of original poems. You can see a video of her art and poems here (she’s number 2 on the video list, “Jael”).
Although we often keep a tradition of “poetry tea time” that is popular amongst homeschoolers, we’re looking forward to once again delving deeper for the next six weeks.
One outward motivation is the River of Words Poetry and Art Contest which all of the kids would like to enter this year.
Here are some of the resources that already have me feeling inspired and we haven’t even started yet:
At the River of Words website you can download a poetry lesson guide for free. The guide suggests using a compilation of art and poetry they’ve published called River of Words: Young Poets and Artists on the Nature of Things. It’s twenty-one dollars on the website but I found it used on Amazon for only a few dollars.
Poetry Tag Time is a compilation of great poetry for children. The collection begins with a poem by Jack Prelutsky and then he “tagged” the next poet and she submitted a poem that was related/inspired by Prelutsky’s poem and so on as each poet tagged the next. Thirty poems in all are included and there are short explanations between poems as to how they’re related. If this doesn’t make sense (it didn’t to me right away), just go ahead and take a look.
The book is only published for use on Kindle and such, but I was able to download a free app to view it on my computer instead. I purchased this resource for a grand total of 2.99 on Amazon (no shipping of course since it’s digital). If you go to the Poetry Tag Time Blog, you will find suggested activities for each of the poems. This resource is going to help our poetry time stay accessible to our six year old. The same women that compiled Poetry Tagtime, also compiled a similar resource for teens called Poetry P*Tag.
A Kick in the Head, edited by Paul B. Janeczko, is an introduction to the main poetic forms, from haiku to cinquain and sonnet, to many other forms I’d never heard of before! Each page contains a poem along with more information about the form in small print on the page and an illustration by Chris Raschka. Janeczko has many poetry books worth looking at, but I highly recommend his other two books in this series, A Poke in the I and Foot in the Mouth.
Wishes, lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry by Kenneth Koch has some interesting and simple ideas. At the end of last year, we wrote “I wish” poems and they revealed the unique hearts of each of us.
Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School by Georgia Heard is the best book I own on teaching poetry. It takes us beyond “just copy the form” to teaching the kids about expressing their heart, experiences, and reactions to the world through verse. Filled with exercises, poetry stations, editing suggestions, it was worth the full price that I paid on Amazon (I think there are used copies available now).
The Dreamer by Pam Munoz Ryan is a story based on the childhood of poet Pablo Neruda. It’s a magical novel about words, dreaming, and following your passion.
Websites:
Poetry for Children, a blog by one of the creators of Poetry Tag Time, regularly posts new poetry books and novels written in verse. Many of her posts on poetry books include suggested activities to go along with the book.
Poetry at Play includes a Weekly Poet highlight, interviews, and articles on the world of poetry.
Notebooking Fairy, Jimmie’s other blog, has several free poetry notebooking pages. As a note, Jimmie’s collage is hosting 10 days of Language Arts, go check it out. In two more days, poetry will be the focus of her blog post.
Practical Pages inspires me in many ways, but one area is how her family “plays” with Poetry. Check her out-you’ll be hooked.
Find a source for nature poetry on this post.
Do you have any favorite poets you’ve studied in your home or other resources that have helped your poetry exploration?