Demo Lesson: Poetry

Focal Texts: Lane Ch 13, Christensen Ch 5
Lesson Title: Re-Thinking Poetry

Purpose/ Goals	The purpose of this lesson is to enlighten students about the misconceptions and irrational fears those often come with writing poetry.  We want to help students re-think the writing processes of poetry by allowing them rely on their own experiences and perspectives. Writing poetry is often considered to be an arduous and overly complex task, but this lesson will simplify this genre for students and get students to feel more comfortable being poets. We also want students to consider how poetry can be used to express social issues and inspire thought and discussion about the status quo.
Objectives	Students will be able to brainstorm ideas and these ideas which will eventually become poems. Students will create a collaborative poem to combine ideas and create a foundation for their own individual writing.   Students will create a poem that will consider different viewpoints within a socio-cultural context that has important implications outside of the classroom.
Assessment	Summative: Students will create and read aloud edited versions of the collaborative poem and their own gender point-of-view poem. This will allow us to determine if they are starting to overcome fears and/or hesitations about writing poetry. They will also being brainstorming in their journals/notebooks, so we’ll be able to tell if they are beginning to understand our methods to begin the writing process.
	Formative: We will be keeping a close eye on whether students seem to struggle coming up with ideas, by walking around the room during individual writing time or paying close attention to what they do share or if they are unwilling to share.  We can adjust the level of explicit instruction based on the perceived level of comprehension by the students.
Community Knowledge and Experience:	We will be asking students to think about and share things that have happened in their own life to tie into their poetry.  This makes the poem they create more personal to them and gives them some ownership in the writing of it.  We will also be asking students to write a poem from a different viewpoint which gives students the tools to examine other members of society by putting themselves in their shoes.  We will be doing these assignments alongside the students and tying in our own experience.
Procedures	Activity One: Collaborative Poem (Approximately 20 minutes) Lyndsey will introduce the lesson. Sarah and Lyndsey instruct students to come up with phrases describing their day from when they wake up to when they get to class.  We will model some examples of what type of phrases they could come up with. Students will write their phrases for approximately one minute (we want this to be very stream-of-consciousness type writing, to increase students’ perceptions about the simplicity of writing poetry) and then students will partner up.  They will share ideas with one another and select their best phrase amongst their partners, sending one person up to the front of the room to write this phrase on the chalkboard. We will then read the phrases aloud in the form of a poem.  “You just wrote a collaborative poem!” (Optional Discussion: Is this a poem? What makes this a poem?) Students will take the poem on the board and re-own it by editing/altering/adding to it to make it their own.  We will model brief examples of this for the students. Students will then get in groups of 3-4 and share their new poems with one another. If there is time at the end of twenty minutes, students who care to share may read their poems to the rest of the class. Activity Two: Rethinking Gender Through Poetry (Approximately 20 minutes) Jan will explain that: “In the previous poem you wrote you started with brief descriptive phrases.  Now we’re going to write a poem from the point of view of a different gender, based on getting ready for school in the morning.” In other words, the poem they have already will serve as the foundation and inspiration for this poem that will rethink gender. Jan will point out examples from what they’ve already written on the board and ask students to think about how the phrase would change if it was from the point of view of a different gender. Different genders include: male, female, transgendered, questioning gender, or anything in between. We want to be as inclusive as possible.  For example: students might think about how they might get dressed, how they would interact with their families or spouses, etc. Jan will explain that students can either use the poem they’ve already written or, if they need more material, begin brainstorming in the same way they did for the collaborative poem. Students will be given 7-10 minutes to write. Adrianne will give some example questions that they can think about when coming up with phrases (“really try to put yourself into the other point of view”): How do you relate to or interact with your family, friends, or people of other genders? How do people treat you? How do you feel about yourself when you look in the mirror in the morning? How do you dress? What do you look like? What is your morning routine? How would you be different than how you are now? Would you be different at all? What about similarities? How do you speak? What do you say? What are your beliefs? Feelings? Emotions? Adrianne will facilitate sharing the poems by asking if anyone would like to read their poems out loud. Some of the co-teachers will be participating in this activity so we can begin with our own poems if students feel uncomfortable with sharing. If students don’t want to share at all (or after the initial sharing), we can examine some important questions about their gender poems: How did your poem expose or refute some stereotypes of specific genders? How did this poem show how you think about gender? What were some issues you struggled with while writing?
Resources	We will need: 28 copies of this lesson plan Chalkboard & chalk Copies of the texts Journals/paper for students’ and teachers’ writings