Online Seminar 5: Task 4 - Amy Benson

Sharon Ruth Gill
The Forgotten Genre of Children’s Poetry

This article talked about the decreasing amount of quality poetry instruction in elementary schools today. Students are not learning about poetry as a means of expressing feelings in a real, purposeful way, but instead they are only learning about the different types of poems and old famous poets. The big idea I got out of this article was that it is our job, as teachers, to keep poetry around and alive in our classrooms. We need to show students how to really use poetry in a meaningful way so that it doesn’t disappear from our instruction altogether.

I really enjoy poetry. I agree that a lot of its meaning is lost on students (and probably even most adults) and I would love to use it more often in my classroom this year. I think that my kids would have a lot of fun doing a poetry unit. I know that at the 4th grade level discussing genre is a big deal and it would be neat to be able to also introduce more poetry in there. I’m not totally sure how I would use it in my classroom, but I think I would start with a few read alouds. I would want the kids to be able to understand that poems are used for real reasons, and they don’t all have to rhyme. I would encourage them to try to write their own poems about meaningful experiences that they’ve had. When I was writing my response to task 1, I was certainly not thinking about poetry. However, now that I am thinking about it, a poem would make a great mentor text (that was the topic of the lesson I watched). It seems like almost every time I’ve written a poem in school, I based the structure off of another poem. I think that using a poem as a mentor text could really enrich the writing my students do. Poetry is a combination of free form and structure at the same time, so it would be interesting to read what my kids come up with.

As a professional, I would have to learn more about poetry writing and instruction myself. I know I like to listen to poems, but I don’t know a whole lot about how to write them or the names of many famous children’s poets. I would need to study up on this myself before I try to teach it to a group of 8 year-olds.

As I plan for instruction, I need to get to know my students better as writers. I am going to be designing a unit (it will mostly be a reading unit) in which I will split my students into three groups (ideally a low, medium and high group). In order to do this, I need to better understand their ability levels; I want to make sure I put students in the right group. Finally, most of the written work my students will do during my unit will be comprehension based, so I will need to carefully construct my assessments. I’m thinking that I may need to design some type of rubric addressing what I am looking for in my student assessments. Assessment is always the most challenging piece of lesson plan writing for me and it is going to take me some time to think it all through.