Aim: What creative approaches can be taken to find ideas for writing poetry?
Do Now: (THINK/SHARE WHOLE CLASS DISCUSSION)
Consider your free time outside of school, what do you do and how do you like to spend your free time? An example includes gaming and dancing.
This marks the second lesson regarding poetry, also known as RL 2 Word Pool Poetry. After discussing the adjustments that were made to the school schedule, the class then proceeded onto discussing the Do Now question. A number of students willingly participated, however, some were called on by Mrs. Peterson. Tempestt responded to the Do Now question with the answer that he liked to draw in his own free time. Most students have a particular thing they enjoyed doing in common, which was gaming. Natalie, Kenneth, and Christopher enjoy first person shooter games. Take for instance, Valorant. In this conversation, Mrs. Peterson mentions that first person shooter games and her never go well together. Moving on, Eric then adds onto the discussion by mentioning that he is not a fan of first person shooter games. The reason behind this was simply because these games evoked motion sickness. To wrap up the discussion, the class ends with Sophia’s response. She claims that she likes to spend her free time playing the piano and this unintentionally links us back to the incident regarding Mrs. Peterson’s pink piano incident. This Do Now question plays into today’s lesson.
Mrs. Peterson then advances onto the following slide, where spirit reading was enacted. As a class, we read Poemcrazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge. While reading along, it is important that students take into consideration what the speaker is saying and what seems to stand out about what she is saying.
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Poemcrazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge
collecting words and creating a wordpool
I have a strong gathering instinct. I collect boxes, hats, rusty flattened bottle caps for collages and creek-worn sticks to color with my hoard of Berol prismacolor pencils. When I was a kid I’d lie in bed imagining I was a squirrel who lived in a hollow tree, foraging for acorns, twigs and whatever it takes to make squirrel furniture.
Most of us have collections. I ask people all the time in workshops, Do you collect anything? Stamps? Shells? ’57 Chevys? Raccoons? Money? Leopards? Meteorites? Wisecracks? What a coincidence, I collect them, too. Hats, coins, cougars, old Studebakers. That is, I collect the words. Pith helmet, fragment, Frigidaire, quarrel, loveseat, lily. I gather them into my journal.
The great thing about collecting words is they’re free; you can borrow them, trade them in or toss them out. I’m trading in (and literally composting) some of my other collections—driftwood, acorns and bits of colored Easter egg shell—for words. Words are lightweight, unbreakable, portable, and they’re everywhere. You can even make them up. Frebrent, bezoncular, zurber. Someone made up the word padiddle.
A word can trigger or inspire a poem, and words in a stack or thin list can make up poems.
Because I always carry my journal with me, I’m likely to jot down words on trains, in the car, at boring meetings (where I appear to be taking notes), on hikes and in bed.
I take words from everywhere. I might steal steel, spelled both ways. Unscrupulous. I’ll toss in iron, metal and magnolias. Whatever flies into my mind. Haystack, surge, sidewinder. A sound, splash. A color, magenta. Here’s a chair. Velvet. Plush.
Dylan Thomas loved the words he heard and saw around him in Wales. “When I experience anything,” he once said, “I experience it as a thing and a word at the same time, both equally amazing.” Writing one ballad, he said, was like carrying around an armload of words to a table upstairs and wondering if he’d get there in time.
Words stand for feelings, ideas, mountains, bees. Listen to the sound of words. I line up words I like to hear, Nasturtiums buzz blue grass catnip catalpa catalog.
I borrow words from poems, books and conversations. Politely. Take polite. If I’m in a classroom, I just start chalking them onto the board. I don’t worry about spelling or meaning. Curdle. Cantankerous. Linoleum. Limousine. Listen. Malevolent. Sukulilli, the Maidu Indian word for silly. Magnet cat oven taste tilt titter.
I call gathering words this way creating a wordpool….
When I’m playing with words, I don’t worry about sounding dumb or crazy. And I don’t worry about whether or not I’m writing “a poem.” Word pool. World pool, wild pool, whipoorwill, swing. Words taken out of the laborious structures (like this sentence) where we normally place them take on a spinning life of their own.
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In this short passage, the speaker discusses her ways of creative inspiration when writing things. Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge likes to collect words and create a wordpool out of it. These words can be obtained from everywhere, anywhere, or it can even be made up. She says that, “Words taken out of the laborious structures (like this sentence) where we
normally place them take on a spinning life of their own.” Students may use a similar method if desired.
Below provided is a link to the video we watched in class:
Daniel Radcliffe Raps Blackalicious' "Alphabet Aerobics" [3:39]
This video of Alphabet Aerobics was incorporated because it is similar to that of a wordpool. There are a lot of words that are mentioned and it’s a rather different format from how we usually see words. It is fun seeing that words can be used so uniquely. After watching the interesting video of Daniel Radcliffe rapping, we then moved onto the next slide, the Team Word Challenge.
Team Word Challenge:
In this activity, Mrs. Peterson breaks the class into their assigned breakout rooms to work on the Team Word Challenge. We are supposed to create a thesaurus of synonyms for the verb “to move or walk.” In other words, students are supposed to find one word for each letter of the alphabet that is associated with the verb. Below are some (not all) examples that my breakout room (Team #3) came up with. Our team ended up having a total of 18 words.
A- Amble E- Exercise
B- Bounce F- Falter
C- Clap G- Glide
D- Dawdle H- Hike
- The scores of teams ranged from 10 words to 23 words. It can be concluded that there are many words that can be come up with just from one simple phrase. These 8 examples all have similar meanings in terms of movement. Another team had Dodge for the letter D. Everyone had similar, yet different answers. Personally, I enjoyed this activity. It was really fun and exciting, considering we only had 5 minutes to think of so many words.
This brings us to an end of the Team Word Challenge. Afterwards, we began to spirit read once again. We should annotate and make notes of what stood out as we read.
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Below is an image of my annotations:
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Students were able to read with confidence and in a clear voice. Two sentences that particularly stood out to me was “Images can carry feelings” and “Image is the root of imagination.” When authors use words to form images in readers’ minds, as readers, we can most certainly feel what the author is trying to communicate to us. They can do this through the usage of words and images are created through the usage of words. Clearly, there is a major connection between the two. From reading this slide, I may conclude that creating images in our writing is a more effective method of conveying ideas rather than explicitly stating it. We then proceeded onto the Image Challenge. In this slide, Mrs. Peterson provides a collage of images of different things.
Directions for the Image Challenge:
Choose one image from the previous slide with your team and together, write a description of what the picture represents and how it makes you feel.
Answer the questions.
Students are once again assigned to their respective breakout rooms for this activity. Our team decided on the picture with the PS5 and XBox. It was suggested by Lixiang, and our group accepted his suggestion. Following the directions, we discussed and shared our ideas as a group for the two questions.
We discussed the PS5 and XBox. Upon seeing these two objects, Lixiang says that it makes him feel poor and broke, a corresponding feeling that the entire group felt. We felt this way because these two items are incredibly expensive. To put it another way, we can’t afford it. No other teams picked the same image as us but below, I have provided an answer from another team of another chosen image. (Seagull & Carnival image)
I would also like to add on that inspiration can be found through experiences. In this case, creative inspiration would be word pools. But there is definitely a variety of methods to use if you’re ever stuck on poetry. Students are not limited to only creating word pools.
- After the allotted time was up, we returned to the Main Zoom Room and went over what different groups got for the task. Below are examples from other groups.
Team #1: Joseph Afflitto was the representative of this group. He said that their group decided on the picture of the seagull. Their description was “The seagull was gliding with its wings fully descended across the clear sky.” The feeling that Joseph’s group felt upon seeing this picture was a sense of freedom.
Team #2: Kenneth was the representative of this group. Their group said that the seagull image above gave off a sense of freedom.
Team #4: Oscar Lin was the representative of this group. He said that his team just provided a description of the seagull’s looks. He says that the eagle was white with black tipped wings. Oscar also says that this image reminds them of the beach and summer since it’s usually where they show up at.
Although this was simply just an image of a seagull, the image of its wings so freely expressed conveyed these feelings.
Team #5: Alma was the representative of this group. She says that her group discussed how the lights on the ferris wheel and merry go round lightened up the night. It gave them a sense of nostalgia and claimed that it looked very fun.
Team #6: Lapyan was the representative of this group. Their description described what they imagined would be there. They said that the smell of candy apples, popcorn, and cotton candy filled the air. There were crowds of people around the carnival and ferris wheel. You hear the children gleefully laughing and screaming on the merry go round. You look up at the bright light high above you. It gives them a sense of nostalgia of being a kid again.
Adding onto the lesson, I can say that images can also be inspiration for poetry. This classwork eases us into the homework assignment. Lastly, Mrs. Peterson goes over the directions for the homework and the class submits their Classwork. For homework, you need to create a wordpool of 30 words/or images in a document.
Reflection:
All things considered, a major takeaway from today’s lesson would be that word pools can be a source of creative inspiration for poetry. Word pools are a collection of random words that is used as inspiration for writing. Inspiration doesn’t have to be specifically acquired through words but it can also be obtained through anywhere and everywhere. Throughout the lesson, I have also learned that words and images are the roots of all writings. Whether they are used to describe things or express how we feel, words are vital to a piece of writing. This lesson was taught for the purpose of educating students that there is another method of getting inspiration when writing poetry. When having to write poems, students frequently have writer’s block. In other words, they’re stuck. Writing poems is never simple because of its complex hidden meanings and format. However, with word pools, students are able to think of ideas more easily rather than sitting for hours with nothing in mind. Creating word pools may help us write our poetry. In fact, this lesson was also taught because we were recently assigned a project (Poem Analogy). To make things easier or smoother for us, Mrs. Peterson decides to enlighten us with a method. As the lesson came to an end, I slowly came to realize how today’s Do Now question plays into today’s lesson. Mrs. Peterson decided to question what students like to do during their free time most likely because what we do may play a part as inspiration for our writing pieces. And to add onto the different methods of inspiration, word pools was an additional method that was introduced. The Do Now question laid the foundation for the lesson. I can use what I learned in the nearby future by creating wordpools to aid in writing poetry. Considering the importance of poetry in English, it is inevitable that I will stumble upon this topic in the curriculum. Perhaps I can even teach this method to my peers and younger cousins. This is the first time I have been informed about wordpools and it would definitely be a helpful tool. If I learned about this method earlier, I may have had a clearer direction of where I wanted my poems to be directed in. Generally speaking, this lesson has given me a great deal of information.
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