I used a PowerPoint, with credit to Art Bellieveu for compiling the great quotes, with my sophomores yesterday to kick-off our poetry unit. The quotes on the slide show are from famous poets expressing their definition of poetry. I put on some Coldplay in the background and just had the students read a few slides worth for about 4 minutes. Then we came back together as a class and generated a list of words that should be included in a definition of poetry – it varied greatly between the classes, which I though was interesting. One class got stuck on the rhyme, stanza, quatrain, haiku kind of terms, which are all components or types of poetry but don’t define it. I quickly steered them in a different direction. The students then wrote their own definition of poetry in their notes, which we will revisit at the end of the unit – which will go quickly as we only have seven class days left. I’m kind of running out of time here, but am going to do the best I can with the time that I have.
My first activity beyond the PP was to have each draw an object from the bucket. These included things like shoe, radio, guitar, pizza, clouds, rain, sun, hot wings, apple, ring, etc. Then students had to generate a simile, metaphor and personification example for their object. Here is my cloud list:
The clouds are like a fluffy pillow. Clouds are a blanket comforting us from the sun. The clouds sneak up on me and create a shadow that frightens.
With this activity, I’m hoping to show the students that the use of figurative language can come easier than they think – although my simile, metaphor and personification for clouds are nothing extraordinary, if I turned those into a poem, it wouldn’t be half bad.
