Aim: What creative approaches can be taken to find ideas for writing poetry?
Do Now:
Today’s Do Now began with a think/share class discussion. Students in the class considered how they spent their free time (activities/hobbies) outside of school and shared these ideas with their peers. Tempestt shared that he personally likes to do a lot of things, but he spends most of his time sitting in his room drawing. Natalie, Kenneth, Christopher, and Eric stated that they enjoyed playing FPS and other varieties of video games. Then, Sophia partook in the discussion and said that she was fond of playing the piano.
Notes:
Right after the class finished discussing what they do in their free time, the class did spirit reading on the short excerpt from Poemcrazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge. Multiple students participated in this section by reading around one paragraph each. Ms. Peterson stated that there was no need to annotate this passage, but instead, hoped that we understood the meaning of the passage. This text allowed me to understand how even the simplest to the most elaborate words can influence the creation of a poem. Even words like frebent, bezoncular, zurber, and padiddle can become the inspiration for a fantastic poem.
Following the spirit reading, the class watched a Youtube video where Daniel Radcliffe rapped the song “Alphabet Aerobics”. The rap was fun and fresh, filled with many words and alliteration in the lyrics. This was related to the lesson since we were talking about WORDS. This is the link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKdV5FvXLuI.
Then came a group activity. Students were put into their respective breakout rooms for a Team Word Challenge where we had to find synonyms of “to walk or move” for each letter of the alphabet. The teams that listed the most synonyms were rewarded points. My team, Group 5, Al-Fayoum Caravan, were able to list 13 words, which are depicted below:
A. automate
C. chase
G. guide
H. hike
I. inch
J. jog
L. lope
M. march
P. parade
R. race
S. stroll
T. trudge
W. wander
We spent five minutes together as a group and came back to share with the class. In the end, four groups were rewarded points. In first place was Group 6, The Sheep, and they were given rewarded 25 points. In second place was Group 4, The Holy Pilgrimage, and they were given 15 points. In third place, where Groups 2 and 5, Levanter and Al-Fayoum Caravan, tied, were both given 5 points each.
Afterward, the class spirit read another excerpt from Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge’s Poemcrazy. This time, however, students were told to annotate and look for phrases that stood out. In this passage, I highlighted multiple phrases, but the ones that were most intriguing were “Image is the root word of imagination”, “I experience desperation through her image”, and “often buried or unexpected feelings”. These really stood out since they exhibited the true meaning of a poem. It is a piece of art that is able to help discover and convey the emotions of the author.
Later, the class was split into breakout rooms again. This time, each group did an image challenge. We had to pick an image from slide 6 of the google slides and answers two questions. My group, Group 5, Al-Fayoum Caravan, decided to pick the picture of a carnival. Our responses are listed below:
Choose 1 picture from the previous slide with your TEAM and together, try to write a description that captures what the picture is AND how it makes you feel:
The lights on the merry-go-round and Ferris wheel illuminate the entire area, shining brightly in the midst of the night. It’s a bustling place occupied by giggles of laughter and screams of joy. The picture makes me feel nostalgic because the sight of the carnival rides makes me think of Luna Park at Coney Island and the time before COVID-19.
Where can you find creative inspiration that you can personally use to create your own form of poetry?
I can find creative inspiration that I can personally use to create my own form of poetry just about anywhere. Whether it be the sunny-side-up egg from today’s morning or the slicing waves upon the shore, anyone can find anything inspirational. I find the homework that I finished to be something creative and inspirational or just simply eating my favorite food. Inspiration is something that relates to me, myself, and it is the same to other people as well.
When we finished our image challenge, students reconvened as a class and shared our responses. Many groups stated that they decided on the image of the seagull and depicted the image nicely with rich figurative language and imagery. Once all the groups finished sharing their responses, Ms. Peterson began to instruct the students on what they were doing for homework.
All students are supposed to create a word pool of 30 words and/or images. These words are supposed to assist students as sources of inspiration once we write our own poems for the poem project due this coming April. Any words and images were allowed to be included in the word pool as long as they can serve as inspiration later on. When Ms. Peterson finished informing the students about the homework, we were permitted to begin doing it since there were 10 minutes left of class.
Reflection:
This lesson was one of, if not my favorite one so far. It taught me that words and inspiration can be big, small, pretty, ugly, and even made up. I felt that the Do Now related to the lesson quite well since it reminded the students of their sources of inspiration, their hobbies. Poemcrazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge enlightened my way of thinking about poems and allowed me to explore boundaries beyond the poems that I was previously assigned as homework. The Team Word Challenge was exciting and helped my group gather the confidence to speak with each other faster since there was a short time limit. Later in the Image Challenge, the questions that we were supposed to respond to allowed me to recognize how much a simple image can mean to me. I will use the ideas that I learned from today’s lesson by incorporating them into my poems. Overall, this was an amazing lesson and I hope to have more like this one in the future.
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