Group teach Poetry

I thought that the experience our group had teaching about poetry went very well. As a group we looked through the book of 20 poetry writing exercizes and picked ones that interested us and thought would be a good lesson.

I really thought that through the read-around there were really good poems written from the different activities that we presented. The first two were obviously easier activities that would be done earlier in the year, which that knowledge could then be built upon. Both the I am Poem and the Found poem were good starters and were a good way for students to understand how to edit poetry. With the "I Am Poem" you can have your students build off on the lines that they created, adding different poetic elements. The found poem is really all about editing language found in any kind of topic. The latter poem activites, memory mapping/ list poems, and the confession poems, required a little bit more thought and creativity, and were better suited for writing done later in the year. This is why we chose to go in the order we did. I think this went well.

My activity was the found poem. I was very pleased with the outcome of the poems. i wanted to do this because i like hands on activites where you can cut and paste and make writing more colorful. the only issue I had was I think I handed out the materials a little too soon. It was hard to get everyone's attention when they had things to look at. So I would have changed that. In a future class I would probably have the students stick to one article and keep the poems more focused, but they turned out to be very creative and varied. This is a fun activity, but in a classroom, you would need to have really good classroom management skills, especially for younger students.

Teaching college kids (and English majors) new poetry activities is a little different than teaching real high school / middle school students. I did a poetry lesson in my pre-internship and it went well, but they of course need a little more guidence and push to be creative. In the process of the group teach I learned all the different methods we taught, and really think that I will use them in the future.