Poetry Reflection
Personal feelings about reading poetry: I honestly haven’t been able to explore reading poetry throughout my life. I am not sure why. It was more of a thing I did only when I was in school, and when it was in school everyone loved it because poetry is short! I also think from elementary school, I have held on to the emotion of hesitation to poetry because it was something that was always difficult for me to both comprehend and create.
Writing Poetry: When I was first taught how to write poetry, my teachers stressed the importance of rhyming at the end of every line or using different ABA, ABBA, etc. patterns for poetry. This absolutely effected my perception of writing poetry. I felt at times I was incapable because I couldn’t rhyme or wasn’t given resources to help me come up with rhymes easily. It wasn’t until sixth grade that I really found that when I write poetry, I enjoy free verse. I do have one distinct memory of writing in my bedroom at my desk looking out my window. My window views the front of the house and I overlook the driveway and felt as though I was sitting high in the trees. I became so involved in thinking about the trees that one day I produced a poem called “Better or Bare”. This poem was about the difference between a bared limb tree and a bountiful tree across my driveway. I wrote from the perspective of the bare tree wishing I had green spring leaves with squirrels and birds surrounding me.
Teaching: One thing I have never been able to do in any internship or student teaching is teach reading and writing. I have had the privilege of teaching science and math as the schools I have been in use team teaching as their pedagogical approach. With this, I am nervous about the process of teaching aspects of writing such as poetry. All I remember with being taught writing poetry is the specific types of poems and figurative language. I remember completing definition worksheets, but I do not remember actually reading poems that gave me examples which may be part of my hesitation for poetry.
What makes a good poem? For me, a good poem is something that I can either personally relate to either by experience or emotions. Recently, I have been more into poems that have a more emotional experience. These poems that I find have typically been on Instagram or Facebook believe it or not. I normally just quickly read over them, say “That was good” in my mind, and then continue scrolling.
Creating a “Poetry Environment”: Since poetry uses both reading and writing, I think that the atmosphere for reading and poetry should reflect a calm coffee shop like atmosphere. I think dimming the lights and relying on natural light if possibly makes a more relaxing mood to have students reflect on poetry. Along with this, I have seen in one of my internships a teacher have small posters of different poets around the room with either quotes or small phrases from their most famous poems. I think it would be cool to do that so students know that poets were people just like them. It is sometimes hard to introduce books authors and poets have written sometimes because students think they are incapable of doing the same thing, and think of the writers as ‘super stars’ that they won’t be able to connect to. I personally was hesitant as a poem writer because of this and was set back because of the main focus of vocabulary from poetry as I have stated before. If possible, I would want students to know vocabulary associated with poetry, but in an interesting way than writing definitions that I did in elementary school. This reminds me that I need to relearn a lot of poetry terms!
Awakening the Heart Reflection
Creating a Poetry Environment
According to Georgia Heard (1999), the environment for a classroom that promotes the recognition of poetry consists of seven aspects. They are:
1. Teachers need to listen deeply to their students ideas, feelings, thoughts, or imagery related to poetry and how they want to express themselves
2. The classroom needs to promote a safe space for writing. It allows students to feel that any piece of poetry they write is valued and can be explored by both their teacher and peer classmates
3. Help students understand that poetry is already present in the classroom by the things they say
a. I absolutely love her idea of making a “What We Say Is Poetry” board in the classroom where teachers can model finding/listening to their students’ discussions and find expressions and phrases that a teacher believes could be poetry. Students would then hopefully jump onto this idea and begin to look for poetic phrases and expressions between themselves to add to this board. The key thing for this board to work is to make it a classroom practice from the beginning of the year!
4. Make poetry and poets more relevant and relatable to them! I reflected on this in my before reading section and how as a student I felt that poets and authors were always “out of my league” and like “superstars” that I could never be as an elementary student. I agree with Georgia Heard that to make poetry more influential and motivational for students, they have to see and hear the poets they read.
5. Every student is a poet. You must believe this! Truthfully believe it.
6. Make any poem, poetic phrase, poem idea, etc. that a student comes up with as the best thing you’ve heard. If they don’t think their idea is worthy, they won’t try it. Embrace their ideas as being unique to them and make them excited about writing poetry.
7. Most important: Do not wait until the last minute to discover poetry in the classroom. Start from the beginning!
Exploring Poetry in Different Ways
As I have mentioned before, my learning of poetry was through writing definitions of vocabulary related to poetry and then reading difficult poems that made no sense to me. What can teachers do about this? Georgia Heard developed centers for students to interactively explore poetry by exploring the structure of poetry both through a reading and listening experience, and focusing on the different ways poetry can be found in their lives! Georgia Heard emphasizes that teachers need to show that poetry is present in everyday experiences! It can be found anywhere.
Center Ideas
Out of ten center ideas, I decided to write about the center ideas I was most intrigued about.
-Amazing Language Center: have students analyze several books that they are familiar with (doesn’t have to be poetry) and have them explore how an author has written it. Have them look for poetic lines or words and having them personally explore how to expand phrases to make simple phrases into poetic lines (pg 8-9).
-Listening Center: I love this idea of having students read either their own or a published poem aloud or record it. I think this would help students verbally understand how poetry flows when being read compared to reading novels! (pg. 11)
-Discovery Center: Have students pick an object and answer questions regarding what it looks like, feels like, and comparing it to something else to write a poem.
-Illustration Center: This is one of my favorites because I am engaged by art and crafts in my work. As an elementary student, I believe I would have been more interested in expressing the visuals of a poem that I read in a way that I see it. (pg. 13)
-Revision Center: Revision is so important in any form of writing that a student completes. The activity that Georgia Heard explains I think is so dependent on a student’s personal understanding of poetry. Her example is to have students dissect a poem she has made into a paragraph back into a poem. Students can be in control of line breaks and add or cut out words. This is not the boring revising of paper and red pen and marking places of a poem. I would like to include this center because it gives the opportunity to find reasons and choices of how to form poetry based on their observations and explorations.
-Poetry Editorial Center: I have never heard of this and I am more than excited to include this into my future classroom. This center would allow students to use or bring in newspaper articles that mean something to them and write a poem reflecting on it. I think it would be so interesting to read students poems regarding political, economic, natural disasters, hopeful stories, etc.
Other centers: Poetry Window and Observation, Performance Center, Music Center, Poetry Reading Center
So they have poems? What to do with them?
I would love to have a poetry wall where I post student poems in the classroom! It gives them purpose to write and also shows that their poetic words and lines are not only meaningful to them, but the entire classroom! I think it would also be interesting to have students read poetry in public. I would make it a choice of course, but I remember doing this! I was in third or fourth grade and we wrote a poem and read it in Barnes and Noble. Of course I was so nervous, but I got all dressed up and presented my poem to shoppers and peer classmates and their families.
Making Poetry an Everyday Experience
Georgia Heard has so many great examples of how to include poetry within the school environment. She emphasized teachers making poetry “gifts” for students for moments they’ve overcome, birthdays, achievements, fears, anxiety, confidence, etc. The main point is that poetry reflects students emotions and allows for the teacher and students to achieve an emotional connection (pg. 30-32). Along with this, she came up with varying anthologies that students can complete. There’s the living anthology and self-portrait anthology.
Living anthology: Have students determine locations around the school to place poetry that they find. These places can include the library, cafeteria, bathroom, hallway, water fountain, main office, etc. The choices need to be left to the students to decide on and they are responsible for finding poems that relate to these areas in anyway. This freedom of choice allows students to find poems that they relate to when they are in these areas, and can also spread awareness of poetry to other grade levels (Heard, G., 1999, pg. 23-27).
Self-portrait anthology: For my class graduate course, we personally are going to explore the process of determining two self-portrait poems that reflect who we are now. The poems that I have found reflect more emotions on what is to come in the next couple of months which is some anxiety, fear, and excitement of going into my next phase of life…following my dream of getting my own classroom! Below are the two poems I think I am going to use for my anthology (When I Grow Up by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater and Risk by Anais Nin). The purpose is to have students have poems they see themselves in. It could have animals, plants, emotions, memories, etc. that reflect who they are. I think it would be cool to include this as an activity in a classroom and post pictures of the student with the poems they choose to be displayed! (Heard, G., 1999, pgs. 35-41)
Poetry Resources:
Where do Poems Come From?
Like I’ve mentioned before, I think the key role educators need to do for introducing and using poetry throughout the year is to invite students to find poetry they are connected to in some way. Poems can come from anywhere! Below is a table of the five “doors” of poetry that teachers can introduce to students in starting the endless possibilities of where poetry comes from:
I purposefully left the blank rows in the table to show that teachers shouldn’t limit students’ poetry to just these doors. It demonstrates that they can come up with their own door to use to begin exploring their poetic verses.
References
Heard, G. (1999). Awakening the heart. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.