Poetry

Poetry through the Senses:

Throughout the course of my teaching experience, I have noticed a major challenge facing teachers of creative writing is how to motivate their students to write poetry. While teaching my own students Writer’s Craft at The Hill Academy, I decided to take a different approach to teaching poetry. Many of my students, being high school level elite athletes, we very much into music. When I gave them their assignment poetry though music a lot of them were confused. Very few every looked at lyrics from their favourite songs as poetry. This unit turned out to be a big hit, students were exploring and finding new meaning to old and new songs all while being motivated to create their own poetry.

In our grade 3 class, we found that many of our students had never even been exposed to poetry. So we decided to take the approach of exploring poetry through the senses. Students have been asked to look at various photos, listen to certain pieces of music and poetry readings online. From there, we would explore through their senses how it made them feel, what they would picture in their mind, how it would taste, sounds they would hear, scents they would envision, and a feeling of touch they may experience. Students took this approach to a level we never imagined, coming up with creative pieces of writing they were proud enough to share with the school. We created anchor charts to post on our literacy board with ideas the class had come up with over a course of a few lessons students could draw on.

On of our most successful lessons was poetry through music; we had the students listen to a piece of music and come up with words and adjectives to describe them to later turn into a poem. Here is one student’s work:

"Funeral at night, I feel sad now. When I cry I taste salty tears in my mouth. When I am in the dark room I feel lonely. When I walk in the room I see broken glass". 

These were some of the words this student brainstormed while listening to the piece of music: 

mystery, dizzy, sad, cool, tears, salt, dance, funeral, scared, boom, broken glass, fight, sharp, red, black, dark, mission, peace, God, creepy, spy 

As we move forward in this unit the students have developed a love and appreciation for poetry. Some of the things we found to be very successful during this unit were:
- creativing a motivating atmosphere; moving desk so students have a sense of privacy at the beginning; dimming the lights; putting on music
- create a positive free share environment; allow students to pass if they do not feel comfortable; positive and descriptive feedback; making students feel assured they will not be exposing themselves. Luckily, our students are wonderful at accepting all and each others differences so this was very easy for us
- offering a number of models of poetry to encourage students there is no right or wrong way to express themselves; exposing students to a variety of styles or coming up with new ones