thanks for the feedback about the demo! Here are the answers to a few of the questions asked in the feedback letters. Thank you for playing along and being willing to display your poetry during the lesson. I was impressed!!
How much time was spent on the sentence poetry lesson?
Actually, I only spent one class period (90 minutes) explaining the process. During the class, students wrote two sentence poems (each with a minimum of three drafts). At the conclusion of the class we conducted a very quick author's chair and each student read one of the poems that he or she created (classmates were allowed only to say thank you after poems were read). Thus, not only did the students experience success, but they shared in the success of others. I was very pleased to see that they remembered the lesson and applied it to later projects unprompted.
Did I give instructions limiting sentence length or offer concrete imagery to those who were struggling?
No, I did not limit sentence length. Nor did I dwell on the quality of the initial sentence.
Commenting on student work:
While students worked, I circulated around the room making suggestions, pointing to images that could be strengthened, sometimes reading aloud an outstanding example, (sometimes I said positive comments to a student louder than necessary hoping that other students would hear and apply the same technique. For example, I might say, "ooh, Lucy I like the way you linked those two contradictory words in that image...wait til you see how much Shakespeare does it later on..."
Usually the only students who picked long, cumbersome sentences were the advanced students. (One of the reasons I liked this assignment was because it met every student on a level that challenged them.) Most struggling students wrote very simple sentences, so this wasn't really a problem. I also noticed that the second attempt involved a longer, more complicated sentence.
Gallery Walk?
I actually didn't do the gallery walk during the English 1 class. This was Kelly's idea a few days before I presented (thank you, thank you, Kelly). As stated earlier, we did author's chair. However, I thought the gallery walk was more successful and will definitely use it next year. And, yes, I definitely wish that I would have had more time and could have allowed another gallery walk to see the edited poems.
Did any of the students become individual poets after the assignment?
I don't really know. I was surprised at the number of students who selected the poetry choice during the Romeo and Juliet Multigenre project. Now that I think about it, J.E., A.A. and A. S. all brought in collections of their poetry and asked me for feedback...maybe they gained confidence.
1 comment:
I really found your sentence poetry useful. I teach poetry, but because writing it is so difficult for me, I find ways like this to teach it so it's safe. I mostly center poetry around a reading unit rather than a writing unit and I think that's a huge dis-service to my students. So thank you for a wonderful way to reach those poetry writers.
And Teri's demo today was ALSO extremely useful for people like me..reluctant poetry writers. THANK YOU!
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