Poetry Resources

As I was writing my entry on Hailstones and Halibut Bones I realized my English Literature page lacked poetry resources. I decided to give poetry its own page and started collecting resources.

Academy of American Poets

Diamonte

Guidelines for Ten Poems

How to Write a Cinquain




Poetry Reading Strategies

Poetry Scavenger Hunt

Poetry Vocabulary

Poetry Writing with Jack Prelutsky

Poetry Writing with Karla Kuskin

PoetryTeachers.com

Primary Resources

Hailstones and Halibut Bones

April is National Poetry Month. When I taught fourth grade we had to complete our poetry unit before April because of testing requirements. However, we would revisit poetry in fun ways during the month. The Academy of American Poets provides resources for those who want to engage children in learning more about poetry.

I used poetry as part of our weekly speaker's theater program, so I had a couple of boxes of poetry books in my classroom library for students to find poems to use for the exercise. I encouraged them to choose styles of poems and to explore different poets.

One book I was glad to see back in print was Hailstones and Halibut Bones. I was introduced to these color poems as a child. I loved the way the author gave colors personalities. When I was in school for education, I was unable to locate the book in print and could only write down copies of the poems to share with my students. Eventually I located a few second hand copies that I gave as gifts to family members.

While kids are naturally drawn to the humor and fun of Jack Prelutsky in A Pizza the Size of the Sun or Shel Silverstein in Where the Sidewalk Ends 30th Anniversary Edition: Poems and Drawings it can be challenging to get kids to move on to new poets that do not focus on soley on humor and rhyme.

Mary O'Neill has been used not just to interest children in reading poetry, but as a means of getting them to write poems that do not rhyme or fit a specific poetic formula. For years, children have pondered what colors are after exploring her poetic definitions.

If you did not read Hailstones and Halibut Bones as a child, it is worth checking out of your local library and reading it with your children. This month is a great chance to check out the poetry section at your local library. Your children will have the chance to explore a variety of different styles, formats, and become more comfortable with a different genre of writing.

If you are looking for information on children's poets check out the Children's Author Blog Page.

Free poetry resources can be found on the Poetry Page.

Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

After listening to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Quirk Classic Series)
I put Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (Quirk Classic Series) on my list of books to acquire from the library. The reviews were not impressive, but I wanted to decide for myself.

My tastes must be different from others because I laughed my way through the book. I listened while working on writing projects, housework, and crochet projects and I found it hilarious. Prior to listening to this book, I listened to an unabridged copy of Sense and Sensibility last week. I wanted a chance to review the original story prior to hearing the parody.

This parody is a combination of Sense and Sensibility, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Qualitas Classics) and Creature Double Feature. While fans of Sense and Sensibility might be outraged, I found I could not stop laughing.

Sea creatures have gone wild and humans are at war with them. Those familiar with Verne will see the influence on adding a sea station to deal with the rising sea levels in flooded London and the technology of subs and underwater diving suits to assist in the battle. In this version, a sea witch curses Colonel Brandon with the face of a sea monster. This creates even more challenges in his quest to win the younger Miss Dashwood’s heart.

While I enjoyed the zombies in the remaking of Pride and Prejudice, trying to stick strictly to the plot of the original made it very restrictive. One of the complaints of this story was one of my enjoyments. The story does add more to the plot in order to make carry of the sea monster plot.

There are many monster classics on the market. I am hoping more come out on CD as I find them a wonderful distraction to listen to while accomplishing other tasks. I will continue to watch for them at my local library.

Teaching the Language and the Historical Context for Shakespeare and Other Literature

In my previous post, I wrote about how wonderful my high school experience with English literature was and how I still find myself returning to books and plays I studied during that time. My college experience was equally bad.

One thing I discovered is that there does seem to be almost a fraternity approach by some to exploring English literature. Much as fraternity pledges are expected to suffer as previous generations have done, sadly many students experience the same approach to English literature. If others have suffered and survived, why should we make it easier for the next generation? Another equally harmful approach is the students are too stupid and therefore cannot handle the material. We will show them the movie and decide they are not intelligent enough to read the material for themselves. Perhaps they get the comic book versions if a teacher is feeling the students can handle the pictures.

Each approach is equally damaging. Students need appropriate tools to study English literature. We teach young children to decode and "break the code" so they can read Standard English. When we teach them foreign languages, we again go through the process of teaching them how to understand the structure and components of the language. Most foreign language programs even include some forms of cultural instruction to help students with comprehension, fluency, and interaction.

However, when it comes to understanding older forms of their own language we leave students to struggles as if it is some kind of coming of age ceremony. This is supposed to determine the children who can and cannot become English scholars.

I believe there are alternatives to what I call the fraternity approach. We do not need to force children to push their way through literature that might as well be a foreign language without a translation or teach them they are too stupid to handle it by not having them read the material.

First, teach the language. We give students Standard English dictionaries and foreign language dictionaries, but when it comes to older forms of our language we, somehow expect them to guess at the words and hope for the best. One of the things I was taught my special education trainers, as an elementary teacher was it was important to work on decoding skills and improve the comprehension skills of my struggling readers. So while my fourth grade student might only be able to decode at a second grade level it was important to work on their verbal comprehension skills which may be at a fourth grade level or higher. Teach the students where they are at and you will see improvements.

For older students this does mean teaching them to decode the literature you are expecting them to read. If you want them to spend all their time learning to decode what is essentially a new language, than you will get little comprehension, let alone high level thinking we expect of our older students. Stop watching them sink and teach the language. Provide them with a copy of Shakespeare's Words: A Glossary and Language Companion or something similar. Give them the tools for comprehension. Stop making them guess. Keep working on learning the vocabulary, but help them increase comprehension, too.

Whether it is Shakespeare or literature that is more modern, teach them the historical context when necessary. Even when teaching younger children I found that books that were categorized as realistic fiction have moved into historical fiction in the sense that the background material is no longer familiar to readers. There are technological, geographical, and historical contexts that my students needed education about to understand the stories assigned.

Understanding many pieces of English literature requires knowledge of the time period. The focus should not be on apologizing or demonstrating how much better things are today, but on what conditions were then. Students are capable of making the comparisons to modern life if given the chance. However, many of them may not understand the social orders, lifestyles, health issues, and other items written about in the books assigned to them to read. This lack of understanding can make comprehension questions impossible, especially ones at the higher level. If you do not understand a sacrifice was made, how do you discuss the sacrifice as a theme of the story?

I know I have been on a bit of a lecture tour today. However, it does bother me that we seem to have to polar extremes to teaching kids English literature. Neither respects the ability to challenge students with the demands of our language. We can provide opportunities for students to succeed if we give them the right tools to approach the learning exercise.




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Using Theater to Encourage Learning

I am not sure I titled this correctly, but I was watching a special on Thoreau the other night and the narrator assumed the audience was basically ignorant of the life of Thoreau even if they were aware of his literary achievements. As he started ticking off the events in Thoreau's life I found I remembered most of the details he was mentioning and even more that he had not listed. Some of this did not surprise me. I was raised near Concord and even had my swimming lessons at Walden Pond as a child. It is hard not to find teachers who feel the need to impress the local history on to children. However, it was in fact not a class, but a play that did the deed for me.

As a student, I was fortunate to have some very gifted high school English teachers. They married during my sophomore year and became an amazing team. They worked quite often in conjunction with the Theater Department to help students make the connection between plays assigned in English to actual theater in production. I was a technical theater junkie from my freshman year forward. I loved seeing how things worked behind stage. I had no desire to leave the dark. One of the shows we produced was The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail: A Play. In order for the play to have meaning, it had to have context. First, one had to know who the transcendentalists were and what they believed. Then they had to know this helped to understand Thoreau, Emerson, and the Concord society of the time. The play uses Thoreau’s opposition the Mexican War, but understanding it is left to the student to research. Then there is the matter of what he was doing living on a pond in Concord in a cabin. Without the background knowledge, the play is about a strange hermit with ghostly visions.

When I was at college, I took a history course and one of my professors was surprised that I had studied transcendentalism in high school. I tried to explain the theater, history, English studies connection, but realized the professor was not buying my explanation. There is still major doubt that children learn more when their learning experiences are connected in activities they enjoy, not just constant repetition of material that they find difficult to connect with on any level.

I had a couple of high school friends who only passed English because of the Theater Department. They tried to focus as many of their English requirements around courses with theater ties because they could fulfill their production requirements with technical theater participation. With help from friends and by watching the show enough times, they finally started to understand what it was all about before being tested on the content.

After watching that TV program, I wondered if the play was as interesting as I remembered. I requested a copy through the library and finished it Tuesday. I realize now the benefits of having worked the show and being forced to focus on the dialogue in order to hit my lighting cues. If I had merely read this play, I might have missed some of the meaning. Seeing it produced made a difference. Having teachers who could put the show in context of who the man was, how the history of the time related to him, and who the other figures in the story were and the importance to him made this a play I still enjoy years later.
It is not a book I read, wrote a paper on, and have long since forgotten. The material I learned was obviously there to be retrieved and explored when this program prodded my interest. This is the one of the strengths of using children’s interests to teach them material we feel is important for them to learn. When we engage their natural love for doing something, we engage long-term memory for topics that might otherwise never be remembered.

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