Hello, happy Memorial Day again! I have yet another post to share today, this one about a classroom transformation and poetry lesson.
The Goals:
-Learn and poetry elements.
-Practice the ACCESS speaking domain/speaking and reading skills.
-Explore various poetry genres.
-Appreciate the beauty of poetry!
The set up included:
-The campfire itself, made of orange pumpkin Dollar Tree lights, and a light I owned from Walmart that moves at various speeds and allows you to select colors (creating a red, rotating, ambient light effect), construction paper flames (taped to the light), and sticks that I had turned into torches for drama props a long time back using recycled bottles and tissue paper.
-My ceiling light covers (magnetic) from Amazon.
-A blanket to sit on.
-Plants that were already in my classroom.
-A Youtube campfire background with sound effects.
-Marshmallows and skewers.
The last thing is a variety of poems printed out to read/analyze.
The Lesson:
To start off the lesson, I read a famous poem (such as "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost). Then we all read it together. Prior to sitting around the campfire, students had around 10 minutes to choose a favorite poem or choose one of many I printed to read aloud, giving them time to choose and practice reading them. We went around the campfire, each reading a selected poem. Next, students took their poems to their seats and I used a document camera to walk everyone through how to label their poetry, and the definitions of each poetry element (though many of them had the definitions from a prior assignment called "Poetry Toolboxes" I would like to share in the future). They labeled stanzas, line breaks, metaphors, similes, alliteration, repetition, onomatopoeia, hyperboles, rhythm, etc. The first times I did this lesson I made a lot of mistakes and did not have a clear order of reading/annotating, and all of my students hand wrote their poems to label them. If I could redo it, I would have more extra copies printed to directly label and maybe have everyone choose a poem in advance so they were all printed and ready. They did a beautiful job writing and labeling, though, and some students went the extra mile to beautifully illustrate their poetry as well. Another mistake I made was having everyone read the first poem together from the screen. Individual copies of the poem would probably have been much easier to follow along with, although it would be more paper.
