Grade Level: 6,7,8
Goals:
*The students will write their own poetry.
*The students will understand and identify types of poetry they find most appealing.
*The students will consider the factors which make a poem appealing to the reader.
Materials:
*List of Internet sites for poetry
*List of poetry books
Content Areas:
*Language Arts
*Technology
Concepts:
*Poetry writing
*Internet skills
*Research skills
Procedure:
1. By now, the students have learned the basic techniques of critiquing poetry and have learned some of the terminology associated with poetry. Now it will be their job to begin writing some poetry of their own.
2. The students will be putting together a collection of poems about oceans and port cities. This portfolio will be composed of both poetry that the student has written and poetry that the student has found that they enjoy and that relates to the ocean theme.
3. The students will be given lists of books as well as websites (see resources) to use to find poems by other authors.
4. In order to write their own poetry, students will need to become familiar with a variety of types of poetry. Different forms of poetry such as haiku, sonnets, couplets, tercets, quatrains, limericks, free verse, form poetry, etc. were already introduced and described on the initial poetry lesson. The teacher will review with the students these examples and then tell the students to try creating a poem of their own. It can be of any form introduced or any other type that they have seen or heard of.
5. The students will spend the remainder of the class period both looking through resource books and the Internet for poetry and writing their own poetry
6. If the students have ample time, the students are encouraged to illustrate their poems.
7. The students will be evaluated on the quality of their overall poetry portfolio. This means that they need to include a variety of poems from other poets as well as a variety of poems that they have written themselves.
Evaluation: The students will be evaluated based on a rubric for their poetry portfolio.
Approximate Time: 3 hours
Teacher's Note: Reminder that the criteria for successful performance needs to be set for the students when using a rubric so they know what they need to do to be successful. For example: All 3s and 4s for an A.
Extensions: The teacher can include any texts that they have about poetry to give to the students to use as resource material.
Resources:
~Barnes, R.G. (ed.). Episodes in five poetic traditions: the sonnet, the pastoral elegy, the ballad, the ode, masks and voices. San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Company, 1972. ~Bankier, Joanna (ed.). The Other Voice: Twentieth Century Women's Poetry in Translation. New York: Norton, 1976.
~Brooks, Gwendolyn, et. al. Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing. Detroit: Broadside, 1975.
~Cole, William. Poems, One Line and Longer. New York: Grossman, 1973,
~Foster, John (ed.). Let's Celebrate: Festival Poems. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
~Hollander, John (ed.). Committed to Memory: 100 Best Poems to Memorize. New York: Academy of American Poets, 1996.
~Howard, Richard. Preferences: 51 American Poets Choose Poems from their own work and from the Past. New York: Viking Press, 1974.
~McLaughlin, Richard. 1000 Years of European Poetry--Music of the Mind. New York: Universal Library, 1963.
~Mendoza, George. And I Must Hurry for the Sea is Coming In. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969.
~Pater, Alan F. (ed.). Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry. Beverly Hills, California: Monitor Book Company, 1980.
~Perry, John Oliver. The Experience of Poems, a text and anthology. New York: Macmillan, 1972.
~Reit, Ann. Alone Amid All this Noise: A Collection of Women's Poetry. New York: Four Winds Press, 1976.
~Riddles, Marilyn Reed. Poems from the Oregon Sea Coast. Brookings, Oregon: Sandpaper Press, 1982.
~Tennyson, Alfred. Edited by Ruth Greiner. Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Crowell, 1964.
~Washburn, Katharine and Major, John. (eds). World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to our Time. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.
Magazines:
~Moonshade Magazine ~The Open Scroll
~Poetopia
~Poetry Magazine
~VOICE
Internet Sites:
~http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/2889/index.html