Poetry Anthologies, Writing, Thinking, and Seeing More If Then Curriculum by Lucy Calkins and Colleagues, pages 57-68

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1 Recommend Texts: Poetry Anthologies, Writing, Thinking, and Seeing More If Then Curriculum by Lucy Calkins and Colleagues, pages This Place I Know: Poems of Comfort by Georgia Heard Extra Innings: Baseball Poems by Lee Bennett Hopkins If You re Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand: Poems about School by Kalli Dakos Fine Feathered Friends by Jane Yolen Roots and Blues: A Celebration by Arnold Adoff g/poetry_booklist.pdf Bend 1: Create a Class Anthology Writers brainstorm possible topics or themes for a class anthology. The teacher can read aloud This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness by Joyce Sidman which is a fictional story about a class that creates their own anthology. Writers quickly draft poems to get at embedded themes from a topic. For example if the topic is baseball, themes may include: practice makes perfect, sometimes no matter how hard you try, you still don t win, or it s hard to let your team down. Some students may choose overlapping themes to write about. The point of this work is to give students practice using poetry to get across meaning and that they write, write, write. Writers zoom in on small moments and vivid images that are tied to the meaning you hope to convey. For this and other teaching points, the teacher will want to model strategies and write in from of students, letting them inside the process of writing. Writers use line breaks to show shifts in time or setting, for dramatic effect, or to influence the way a reader reads the poem. Writers use all they know about narrative writing when they write poetry. They use dialogue, internal thinking, descriptive details, and other craft moves to bring out what a poem is really about. The qualities of good writing span genres. Writers delve into mentor texts and poetry anthologies to get ideas about craft and structure. The teacher may display poems around the room, have a poem of the day, and fill the class library with poetry. Also teachers may want to refer to mentor poems during the mid-workshop TP. Writers know that poems about the same topic can be different or get at various sides of the topic. The teacher may want to compare Dreams by Langston Hughes and Listen to the Mustn ts by Shel Silverstein. Hughes s poem is dark and suggests that without our imagination, we are lost. Silverstein is more hopeful, letting the reader know that dreaming is always possible, even when others are naysayers.

2 Writers consider who the speaker might be and what we can tell about the speaker from the ideas that come through in the poem. Teach students that the poet and the speaker may or may not be the same person: that poets can take on the voice or persona of someone else. Students can try this in their own writing. (This TP may be a continuation of the previous one.) Bend 2: Generate Ideas for Anthologies and Collect Poems Writers come up with topics for their individual anthologies and write poems exploring different perspectives on those topics. This theme choice should feel deliberate and intentional and be one about which the children have some strong feelings and investment. Writers grow poems out of observations, emotions, memories, images, or a clever turn of phrase that is borrowed, overheard, or invented out of the blue. Teachers may want to introduce 3 or 4 strategies, so as not to inundate students with too many strategies at once. Possible strategies are indented below. Students begin collecting ideas and/or poems in their writing notebooks. Often journal entries may not start out looking like poems, instead taking the shape of small paragraphs, perhaps like story blurbs. This is to be expected, but what is important is that children learn to generate ideas that have power and meaning. Writers read poetry with a partner (first aloud, then silently) and discuss it. These conversations often lead to fast and furious writing of original poems. Teachers will want to model how a mentor poem can lead to a poem about the same topic, a poem that follows the same structure, or a poem that talks back to the original poem. Writers know that poems don t have to look or sound a certain way. Teachers can choose to read a selection of poems from a couple anthologies that showcase different effects a group of poems can have. For example, a Jack Prelutsky book may include poems loosely connected by humor, whereas Lee Bennett Hopkins s baseball collection as a more explicit topical connection with more diversity of emotion and style. Writers comb through old journal entries to evoke inspiration. Teachers will urge students to pry old entries apart with a pencil, to circle or copy out a line or a paragraph they might turn into a poem. Writers often return to the same themes over and over. Writers look at images or going on observation walks with a notebook and pen in hand to gather seed ideas. Teach students to first write long about what they see, what they notice, and what this makes them think. It is essential for teachers to model a thoughtfulness and a wakefulness to get a poem going. Writers notice how songs are actually poems. They include line breaks, repetition, figurative language, and rhyme schemes which may inspire the students to write more poems. Also 2 songs may be on the same topic, but have very different angles (e.g., Love Hurts and All You Need Is Love ). A catchy phrase or lyrical line may inspire a bigger idea.

3 Writers don t wait to revise their writing; even a first try is open to rethinking and reworking. Teachers will want to model how a first try can spawn new thinking that leads to the writing of a whole new poem, not just changing a word here and there. Also, teachers will continue to encourage students to write a lot which often means writing lots of versions of poems rather than long poems. Below is an example where Lucy added an image about the setting to make the poem more piercing. Original He was so mad he threw a shoe into the basement wall. I was scared of his anger as usual. Revised He was so mad he threw a shoe into the basement wall. The shoe thumped to the ground, leaving a hole, ragged and dark between my brother and me. I was scared of his anger as usual. Writers review poems as the unit progresses and decided that they need to go back and collect more entries, so they can write more poems. Often anthologies start to shirt, and they ll need new poems to fill out their ideas. Bend 3 Get Strong Drafts Going and Revise All Along Writers talk with their peers to write more reflectively about the entries they have collected. To help students uncover deeper meaning, teachers may want to create an anchor chart of the following talk stems. I m writing about this because I want my reader to feel or think One thing that may be missing here is Writers began to draft their ideas more formally and experiment with the craft of poets. At first, teachers often emphasize free verse, but rhyming can be taught as well. Writers turn prose into poetry. They do this by discovering rhythm in sentences. For example: Prose Poetry I was running in the park with my friends, and we were all running together at first, But because I had allergies, I had trouble keeping up with them. Soon I was all by myself, watching my friends run farther away from me. I felt so weak and alone. I was running in the park / with my friends, / and we were all running together at first. / But because I had allergies, / I had trouble keeping up with them.

4 Writers decided where line breaks should go. They know from other poems that sometimes they go where there are end marks, sometimes they go after important words, and sometimes poets use line breaks just where they think it sounds good to pause. Writers experiment with making lines and stanzas that quickly create the visual look of a poem. Writers may decide to cut lines or cut and paste lines into a different order. This can change the tone of a poem. For example: original eliminate words add syllables to make breathless & fast paced shorter breaks make poem quieter I was running in the park / with my friends / and we were all running together at first. We were all running together / at first In the park we were all running together at first My breathing got harder and I started to fall behind. Soon I was alone. Writers use meter (the number of beats/syllables in a given line, plus the pattern of those syllables) to affect their poetry. Writers convey their ideas visually, deciding how long or short to make their lines on the page, whether there are stanzas and how many, which words are capitalized, and what kinds of punctuation to use. The white space around words is used by writers to pause, take a breath, and make something stand out from all the other words. Writers know a variety of techniques to revise poetry. They could try starting right in the moment instead of summarizing everything about their subject. They could try being more precise about their choice of words. They could add imagery (similes) to convey meaning. They can express their thoughts and feelings by the way they make a line sound. They choose when to use rhyme and which words to rhyme. They choose to leave the reader a gift at the end by adding a special image. Writing partners work to energize each other. They give each other feedback and recommend next steps. Partners also notice where there are holes in the anthology. Writers play with punctuation. For example, if you want the mood to be sad, use less exclamation points. Also, writers use commas to break apart a list or to add more detailsupplying words to their lines. Writers may use standard forms of poetry such as a haiku or pantoum.

5 Bend 4 Edit Poems and Assemble Anthologies for Publication Writers make purposeful choices about grammar, spelling, and punctuation and stick to those rules when they write poetry. For example, a poet may decide to go to a new line at the end of every idea instead of using a period. Then, when she edits she will check that she always does this. Writers decide which poems to include in their anthologies. They may choose the ones they like best, or base choices around subjects. Writers may include mentor poems and even excerpts of texts to complement the them of their anthology. Writers make choices about the order of poems. They may look at mentor anthologies to see how poems are organized. Writers celebrate. Anthologies and/or poems can be shared in many ways. They may hang around the room or school with illustrations or be performed.