As a novice Language Arts teacher, I just wasn't comfortable with teaching poetry, and so, I did the least I could while adequately meeting the state standards. As a result, my early students experienced only a few poems each year: the poems found in their textbooks and maybe a few others I threw in. My classes all read the same poem at the same time and then answered the same questions, thereby ensuring that everyone "covered" the required objectives. While that approach got the job done, it also ensured an abundance of students would enjoy not even one poem they encountered in class. And that is just wrong.
During those many - too many - years of striving to appease the standardization gods, I noticed that a few of my students actually seemed to enjoy poetry, even some students now referred to as "emerging readers." So, in an effort to spread the love, I scrapped everything I'd ever done in the past and created what I call a Poetry Buffet. Yes, it's scary, but you can do it, too.
When assembling a Poetry Buffet -- a wildly diverse collection of poems -- keep these three words in mind: abundance, variety, and choice. Just as a buffet table offers morsels that tempt even the pickiest eaters, your collection must be varied and visually appealing to as wide an array of readers as you are likely to teach. At last count, my buffet consists sixty laminated pages, front and back, of illustrated poems, all gleaned from poetry collections like these:
Don't let the word "children" scare you away from these amazing books. The collected poems range from "just for fun" --
-- to "perfect for cultural celebrations" --
-- all the way up to "challenging for Honors 8th Grade." AND the accompanying CDs provide you with professional recordings of selected poems!
On Poetry Buffet day, you will place two laminated sheets in front of each student. As gentle music plays in the background, students answer the questions on teacher-made handouts, addressing the elements of poetry on which you want to focus that day. When finished with the poems in front of them, they get up and move to work with the poems on another table. Obviously, the process flows much more smoothly if you have at least one unoccupied place to which a student can move when he is ready.
So often, students think they're supposed to learn a particular poem instead of learning the general elements of poetry. For that reason, the handouts should require that your students answer the same questions about different poems they read. For example:
- Is this a narrative poem? Explain why or why not.
- Write an example of onomatopoeia and explain the sound it is trying to imitate.
- How many stanzas does this poem have?
- What lesson, if any, does this poem teach?
How many poems should students analyze during the buffet? As many as they are able to complete during the time you allot for the activity. That's why you'll want to provide a stack of spares for your more advanced readers. I really enjoy giving the students the ability to work at their own pace. If you have any students obsessed with the notion of "fairness" -- (Hey! HE only did two poems today!) -- you may want to let them know that they will ultimately be choosing one of their analyses to submit for a grade. The kids who complete more analyses have a wider range of work from which to choose. Also, my students' final assessment consisted of completing a similar handout, analyzing a poem we never studied as a class. In theory -- and usually in practice -- the more poetry analysis practice they got, the higher their final assessment grade would be.
As students move from desk to desk exploring the buffet, you circulate the classroom attending to these two tasks:
- Answering questions that crop up: "Mrs. McHale, can you tell me one more time what 'onomatopoeia' is?"
- Making note of any poem that students just don't "get."
I will never forget the day a very bright eighth grade boy read "How to Paint a Donkey" by Naomi Shihab Nye --
-- and his "take" on the poem was something like this: "It's just a dumb poem about some dumb donkey." While hilarious, his response made abundantly clear the fact that he (and probably the rest of the class) needed a great deal of practice with abstract inferential thinking!
I try to do at least three Poetry Buffets during April, National Poetry Month, interspersing them with lessons that 1) address specific elements I want to teach or 2) give students the opportunity to analyze a specific poem in small, heterogeneous groups. You may want to give students who like to read aloud the opportunity to present a poem to the class. And, it is always fun to follow along silently with celebrity recordings of famous poems, like this one:
After feasting at the Poetry Buffet, at least one student will develop a taste for poetry -- (It happens every year!) -- so add a few volumes to your classroom library if you can. Who knows? They may whet your appetite for the genre, too!
You can find examples of Poetry Buffet ThinkSheets at TeachersPayTeachers.com: Poetry ThinkSheets .
Reading and writing should be inextricably interwoven in the teaching of Language Arts, and it's important that we continuously find ways to wed our students' reading to their writing activities. But that's not always easy (especially for novice teachers). Our next post, Prose from the Pros: Putting Your Classroom Library to Work, show an example of how it can be done.