"Guiding Students Through the World of Poetry”  

By: Shaniel Liburd-Bryan

Continuing to learn about the different genres and types of writing pieces, we focused our attention on Poetry. To begin the session, my classmates and I were given the first task : 

 

"To state whether or not we like poetry and why"

I joined a group of people who didn't love poetry. My reason was that I felt it was difficult to understand because it often uses complex language and symbolism. As I wrote that I reflected on my classes during my school days and vividly remembered poems with sentences I couldn't decipher. As well as the teacher who didn't make it much easier to understand or even like the art form. I was always left to wonder:

This brought us to the main topic of the discussion, which was how teachers can instill a love of poetry in their students by teaching them in interesting and entertaining ways. Poetry instruction can cover a variety of subjects, including reading expressively, using figures of speech, rhyming patterns, imagery, and identifying our senses. Instead of rhyming words, which, we have to admit is the most popular and overly used topic when it comes to teaching our students about poetry. 

To demonstrate these topics, poems entitled "The Sea" and "The Flattered Flying Fish" were utilized. We were given step by step process of how we can teach students and how we can break a poem down for students to understand. For example:

• When it comes to reading with expression, she selected a couple of persons to read the selected poems. This activity highlighted reading with little to no expression can make a seemingly interesting poem to be a bore.

A more engaging way is to model how you'd expect your students to read the poem. Demonstrate voice ranges, expressions, and tones for punctuation marks so students can see how tone and expressions can bring a piece to life. Activities such as role plays were also heavily suggested. 

Another suggestion to teach literature was instead of the norm rhyming words, we should teach students how to find the rhyming pattern of a poem. This was new to me but was very useful.

Some Additional Poetry Teaching Ideas

• Teach imagery: help students identify words or sentences that help paint a vivid picture of what the author is trying to portray.

• Appeal to our senses: Identify words throughout the poem that speak about smell, sound, touch, etc.

• Figures of speech: Open the students' minds to similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia, etc.

• Poem selection: Choose a poem that is appropriate for the grade level and of interest.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the session and gained tons of insight into teaching poetry. Some of which I can't wait to do with my students.

So, until next time.......