1. The big ideas or "take-home message" from Gill's article, The Forgotten Genre of Children's Poetry was about the importance of children understanding what poetry is and how it can be significant in their lives. When poetry has a special connection to a child's life, it becomes more than just rhyming words on a page. Poetry helps children to understand new ways of incorporating their five senses into written text and how to choose specific words based on their sounds or meaning.
2. I think that a poetry addition to our writer's workshop would be a great way for my students to broaden their writing styles and genres. They would be able to incorporate more descriptive words, different senses, and learn about different rhyming schemes. My students could even write a poem about a topic in their writers' notebooks. Turning a narrative or opinion paper into a poem is a fun way for students to get excited about what their writing and how their readers will interpret their writing.
3. As an instructor, I would have to learn more about how to teach the poetry genre to my students and different poetry works or authors that I could share with my students as examples. I would need to research what components are necessary to include for different kinds of poetry and what forms of assessments would be appropriate to include based on the GLCEs for fourth grade.
4. Through this module, I have learned that ultimately it is important to always ask myself "What am I learning from this student as a writer?" while I am assessing a student's writing. The kinds of assessments that are used for a student's writing should be appropriately aligned with the GLCEs from that grade, the topic of the assignment, and the resulting outcome of what you are expecting to see from the writer. It is important to fully understand each student's abilities as writers so that you can appropriately assess them and determine how they can improve their writing. A combination of anecdotal records, final drafts, and evidence of revisions should be considered while assessing a student's writing.
Emily,
ReplyDeleteI also read the Gill article and discovered some interesting information about poetry. I love the way that you talk about poetry as being a part of writer’s workshop. I was thinking the exact same thing. I would love to see poetry being more integrated into the literacy curriculum in my classroom. Instead of simply exploring the “classics”, I think poetry should be used as an exploration and expression outlet. It would be great for classrooms to work on building their poetry collection by collecting poetry written by other children and/or for children. Poetry is a new genre of writing; one which deserves the same exploration as other writing genres. As you mentioned, writer’s workshop could be used as a time for students to learn about different rhyming schemes and other styles of writing. I like the example you give about turning an opinion paper into a poem as a way to get students excited and motivated about writing. Poetry is just another way for students to express themselves in new and fun ways. After all, each student’s learning techniques and expression styles are different. Some kids might be able to express themselves and their ideas/thoughts through poetry, rather than in a paragraph form paper. During my unit teaching, I would love to do an activity with poetry; maybe allow students to express their thoughts and ideas through free verse. Great post and see you on Tuesday!
-Kendall