Some Art

Friday was a great day. It seemed like we got to look at art all day long. It started in reading where we have been talking about Paul Revere's life. We decided to look at how two artists had portrayed Revere in their work.

The first painting is from Grant Wood and the second painting is from John Singleton Copley. As we looked at the art, the class took notes on what they saw, what they noticed, and what they wondered. I am always amazed at what the students can find when we look at art. Each year a student finds something new that I had not seen or thought of before.

After the students finished seeing, noticing, and wondering, they got in groups and filled out a Venn Diagram comparing the two paintings. The differences were easy but the class was able to come up with many interesting things the paintings had in common. 

Today in class we added another piece of artwork on Paul Revere when we looked at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." We talked about how Longfellow released the poem in 1861 years after the famous ride. The students looked through the poem looking for things that we knew from the historical tellings we had looked at of the midnight ride. Tomorrow we will go more in depth and look at what the poem and the history have in common and what is different.

In poetry we continued to read Ralph Fletcher's amazing book Poetry Matters. 

The class has been working hard to craft their poems in their writer's notebooks. The last bit of advice that Fletcher gave about crafting dealt with Line Breaks and Stanzas. I told the class that this is a struggle for me in my writing but Fletcher gave some great advice to help us all. My favorite piece of advice was to read the poem aloud. When our voices stopped, we should start a new line. To work on this crucial skill we looked at some Beatles lyrics. I showed the class how I might take the lyrics from "You've Got to Hide Your Love Away" and add line breaks and stanza breaks. I read the poem aloud and even played the song for the class. We added single slash marks for a line break and a double slash mark for a new stanza. Then the class got into groups and worked on the same idea with the song "Blackbird". Finally they went into their writer's notebooks and took some time to look and think about line breaks in their poems. 

This work will hopefully help this week as the students are picking their three favorite poems to turn into projects. I already saw some students today continuing to use the slash strategy before they wrote their first draft.  

I hope your week is off to a great start.