In the book Fletcher talks about the three pillars of poetry. We have already made our way through the first pillar--emotion. This week we started the second pillar of poetry--image. I keep telling the class that this is my favorite type of poetry. So far Fletcher has given us two pieces of advice about how to make our poems more visual. The first piece of advice was to write using the five senses. That day we read the poem Knoxville, Tennessee by Nikki Giovanni.
Today Fletcher told us to add similes and metaphors to our poems. When we were done reading the section of the book, we read a poem that contained a simile and a poem that had a metaphor. The poem with the simile was The Park by James S. Tippett. The metaphor poem was called Metaphor by Eve Merriam. One of my favorite parts of this whole unit is sharing poems with the students. Already we have read poems by Georgia Heard, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, and Carl Sandburg. Hopefully by the end of the unit students will enjoy reading poems as much as they seem to enjoy writing them.
When we were done reading our two new poems, we started to work on similes. We created a quick poster as a class and I shared some similes students of mine had written in the past. Then I asked the students to create some of their own similes. I am always amazed by the similes students create. I think the students have such an amazing way that they see the world and it really shows in their similes. After all this work, it was time for the students to write. I put up a picture (which I love to do when we are talking about image poems) and off they went. The students knew they could write anything they wanted as long as they tried to add a simile. I cannot wait to read the writer's notebooks again this weekend. I know they will be great.
I hope you are all having a great week. I will try and blog this weekend about one of the upcoming PARCC Performance Based Assessments (PBA's) so if you were checking in for that update I will get it here soon.
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