This lesson actually works with almost any poem you might want to use with your students. I learned this lesson from Toby Lurie when he was the guest artist at the Pinion Poetry Festival which was held in Reno, Nevada during March for most of the years I taught in that state.
Educational goal: Students will understand the message of the poet by responding to individual lines of a piece of work.
Activity:
Read a poem (any poem) to your students one line at a
time. Give them time to respond to the line in
writing. The response can be a question, a statement,
or part of a thought. It is an immediate response to
what you have read. Give them time to write what they
are thinking. Follow the same procedure throughout the
poem. When you have finished reading the poem, tell
the students to look at what they have written, line by
line. In essence, they have already written a poem
that responds to the piece of literature you have read to
them. Give them a few minutes to edit some of their
lines and have them read back to you what they have written.
Read back activity: First have various students read
one line at a time. You read the line from the poem
and they respond by reading what they have written in
response to that line. Then, have students read the
entire poem they have written in response.
This activity has surprised many students. Those who have never written a poem are often surprised at what they have accomplished. You may also experience surprise at the responses you receive. Remember, no response is wrong. The object of the lesson is to develop personal responses to literature. Student experience dictates these responses. And there can be NO wrong response in these situations. It is always good for you to try one of these poems before you introduce it to your students. Below is a poem I personally wrote in response to a poem Toby Lurie read to us. It has been a while, but I think it was in response to a Walt Whitman poem:
| You laugh The universe resonates You laugh The hills resound You laugh The caverns reverberate You laugh No one responds Your
eyes don't smile You
laugh, but You
laugh
|
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