sbally’s blog

Shawn Bally

3/19/09

ENG 484

Poetry Analysis and Response

Instructor: Shawn Bally

Class Period: 4 (50 minutes)

Grade Level/Course Title: Sixth Grade English

Materials/Texts: Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson

Time/Date of Lesson: Week 8 of Classes (November)

Background of Text: As a class, we will spend the first 3 days of class reading the novel Locomotion by Woodson (100 pages). This book tells the story of an 11 year old boy who is faced with living life in a foster home after his parents are killed in an accident. He is split apart from his little sister Lili between two different foster pairs of foster parents. As a result to his jumbled emotions and feelings, his teacher suggests he express himself through the art of poetry. The entire book is told in a series of different poems ranging from Sonnet to Haiku. These poems are all written in a first person point of view that seek to describe the main character’s (Lonnie) feelings.

Activity: Upon finishing the book in class, students will break into groups. Each group will be assigned a type of poem from the book. They will then work together to research the rules and fundamentals of the poem, as well as the background history of its creation. Each group will then choose a theme from a provided list of topics for which they will compose their style of poem about. Finally, each group will create a presentation to inform the class of their research, followed by the poem that they have worked collaboratively to create.

Objectives/Purpose: This lesson will teach students about the various forms of poetry. However rather than be lectured by their teachers, they will be taught by their peers. Furthermore, this lesson will encourage students to work in groups towards a common goal. They will have the opportunity to divide work up amongst the members to create a final project. Finally, the lesson will ignite students into thinking creatively by having them produce their own poem. While poetry is a shorter version of writing, it will facilitate students into the  idea of creative writing that will reflect their experience with the theme.

Challenges: There are always challenges and issues that come with group work. This may be the biggest challenge as the educator because I must be sure no to intervene too much into the group work while assuring that everyone is holding their weight. Another challenge may be getting students to write one creative piece that represents them all. Some members may push their ideas while others contribute very little, causing a poor representation of the entire group’s creativity.

Informal Response for March 17^th, 2009

            I find Neman’s dilemma of students’ trouble with writing to an audience was particularly interesting. Students often get the idea that they are not writing to an actual audience and that their writing is merely practice for “ real world” writing. This is ironic because students in the middle grades likely will not be writing to an audience in the “real world” or facing any real life situations to where their writing is so critical. One solution to this problem is the teacher establishing a target audience for the students to write to. However this method is flawed because the students know that their writing will actually be read by the teacher and not by the target audience. As teachers we must be sure to stay objective as possible in grading these works by not grading them as teachers but grading them as the target audience.

            I also like Neman’s approach of students finding the voice of their “better” self. This idea suggests that the most persuasive voice is that of the author. The task however is the author’s task of achieving himself/herself as a credible source in making a persuasive argument. This is achieved first when students establish their expertise with the content being discussed. Such an obstacle is tough for students who have had little previous exposure to the content compared to other students who may understand the content better. It is for these students, that teachers must stress the idea of research in the classroom and study time that will build their content knowledge of the subject area. This will be specially significant in my future classroom as an English teacher when assigning research papers. I think an affective means of getting my students to learn and express their feelings about a topic will be to assign a research paper that they likely know little about. As a former student, this is a task a did not particularly enjoy but one that always made me work and built my content knowledge of specific topics.