Picturing Poetry

Today I’m sharing the successful lesson of a colleague! Our Grade 3-6 teacher wanted to do some poetry as part of her Literacy block. Like many Literacy/English teachers she felt a little overwhelmed about where to start and, since we have planning time together, we often work through ideas and so we put our heads together on this.

I expressed my concern about how teachers usually jump in to getting students to write poetry without actually teaching them any of the structure and features (admitting that I am a Literature snob!). Haiku, limericks and acrostics seem easy because they are structured but what about the imagery and vocabulary that form the foundation? She expressed her concern about not having confidence in her ability to interpret poetry and doubts about whether this age group would cope.

We checked out a few of my favourites, which I selected because of the figurative language and imagery. We came up with a plan to break them down stanza by stanza (introducing metalanguage). Students would identify parts of speech with particular focus on nouns and adjectives. They would then draw pictures using these words to prompt their imaginations and write a short explanation, in plain English, to tell the story.

So, effectively we were asking grade 5 and 6 students to analyse poetry that I would normally give to my year 11 VCE students.

Today she shared a couple of pieces of work from the grade 5s … and I was blown away! Using the poem “The Sleepout” by Les Murray her students totally proved that if you set high expectations students will do their best to achieve them.

I love the birdseye view and the use of colour.

 

What I like about this is that the student ‘gets’ the blurring between reality and imagination … notice how the walls dissolve and become part of the forest?

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How do you tackle poetry in your Literacy/English sessions?