Class 4: Missed

Day #4 Hearing the Poetry Kids Hear: Music and Poetry

Poetry books related to music

Flash drive – poetry/music book – God Bless the Child, Hush Little Baby, Beebop

5:00-6:00 Jan Miller Burkins, guest poet: Writing the blues

Blues music, Yesterday I had the Blues

Reading & writing the blues - write, confer, share

6:00-6:15 Explore LiteracyHead

6:15-7:00 Poetry Workshop 2: Musical/Poetic Response to Literature

· Play the song you brought as people read the lyrics; tell why the song is meaningful to you

· What is the pattern in each song? Which song might be easiest to use in writing your own? Or what melody do you all know well enough to sing?

· As you listen to me read (Black History theme, e.g., biography, jot down strong words, phrases, possible themes

· In groups (or individually, in pairs), decide what song or pattern to use as a melody or rhythm (it helps to start with common melody; use the internet)

· Construct verses that tell the story, a chorus that emphasizes the theme

· Perform if you will! – show text on document camera

7:00 Pedagogy Groups

· Discuss chapters 1 and 2 in A Note Slipped Under the Door & Linda Christensen’s “Celebrating the Student Voice”

· A Note…good model for lesson planning, connected lessons rather than just an array of ideas

· whole group discussion – re: Guidelines for Teaching Poetry

· how can we as teachers learn more about youth culture, why it is important, and how to connect through music/poetry

· what do kids in your community listen to? How can you find out?

· Hip Hop Educator Marcel Mincey, Black history rap, grammar, presidents http://www.myspace.com/rapthenation

· Past classes: Tiffany – uses Elvis lyrics (4^th), Sabreen - blues

· How can you incorporate these ideas in your teaching?

God Bless the Child – Billie Holiday, Jerry Pinkney

– Pinkney did extensive research – photographic records, interviews with people who had migrated, museums

– depicts great migration of African Americans from the deep south to cities in the north, around 1900-1950 – “the largest peacetime movement of people in the united states”

– they moved for jobs and schools, but often found segregated schools and housing, unions that excluded them

– brought spirituals, mingled with urban jazz, great blues singers like Billie Holiday

– Pinkney ends the book in a classroom – education seen as the great promise of equality, how the child would “have his/her own”

– Jean Bap•tiste Pointe du Sable (zhän ba-tēst' pwant dOO sä'blu) pictured on blackboard – Haitian, “father of Chicago”

Students studying events, periods in history

– study the music or poetry of the time

– select song or poem, illustrate with photographs or art

– write a song or poem about a specific event and do the same

Hush Little Baby – Brian Pinkney (son of Jerry Pinkney)

- interpretation of a nursery rhyme, Appalachian lullaby

- set in a 1900 African American family – Mama goes to work, Papa “is left to care for the young ‘uns”

- drew on his own experience as the father of two young children

Talk about, illustrate, rewrite popular rhymes

Beebop Express

- read aloud, choral reading, study the rhythm, write another verse/stanza

7:30 Next week: how can we help kids revise?

Start Locomotion! (has anyone read it?)

A Note Slipped Under the Door: Teaching from Poems We Love

Nick Flynn and Shirley McPhillips (both involved with Teachers College Reading and Writing Project with Lucy Calkins, Nick as Poet in Residence)

Chapter 1 A Compass Through These Waters

Mentor Poem: Shawndell’s Williams’ (3^rd grade) poem Kingdoms with Love

• concept of “mentor poems” – we’ll talk about all semester
• – “ a poem that we love, that moves us in some way, intellectually, emotionally, or spirituality”
• – and ones that we can learn from and emulate in terms of style, language, emotion, etc.

Use of the book:

• each chapter has several mini-lessons that can be adapted for your class
• focus on series of lessons
• 4 headings: Getting Started, Keeping it Going, Extending our Thinking, and Mini-Inquiry

Terms

• writers notebook, entries from daily writing, seedlings (could be folder, etc.) see appendix C
• mini-lesson
• inquiry
• sketching (drawing after hearing, reading)
• writing long

Chapter 2 Watermelons in My Grandmother’s Car: The Image

Mentor Poem: In Passing by Alberto Blanco

• how can we hold people and events in our memories without images, like the car so dirty a watermelon literally grew?
• “Images hold the meaning of our lives”
• KEY: “I think about the image first and the rhyme [or structure] only incidentally” – start with image, not form!

Mini-lessons, 2-3 weeks on Imagery

• getting started:
• 3^rd, pictures in your mind, students then find poems with strong images
• choosing a mentor poem: In Passing (student found), read, discuss, mark images
• sketch – “directed looking” at specifics of image – “students mark places in their notebooks where they have written so that it gives us an image. They are then to choose one and sketch it”
• discussing sketches, next day, may not have the concept yet, find examples that do, partner discussions
• rewrite poem WITHOUT images (see how different), then re-examine their own entries
• writing long
• conferring on imagery (keep notes – good ideas for next day mini-lessons on what kids need), lots of questions, “close your eyes and picture her, now tell me what you see…” conference examples, Appendix B
• keeping it going
• further discussion, examples of images
• modeling in our notebooks (teachers own writing) of sketching, narration of sketch>>>plans for poem
• using literature – looking for images in other reading
• extending our thinking
• use of place in mentor poem – talk with partner about the setting of your image (from notebook), report some in whole group, read entries, etc.
• read What you Know First [use more urban examples, Street Music, Carolina Shout, etc.]
• use of action in mentor poem – look at verbs, then at your own
• other ways writers create images: action, setting, dialogue, metaphor/simile, objects, comparisons
• mini inquiry
• sometimes whole class, sometimes a small group
• 2-5 days
• writing long: work backwards from mentor poem to “long” version poet might have written (do together as class)
• modeling students writing long
• read what student wrote
• sketch what you “saw” when I read
• modeling our own writing long, think aloud about your choices, show your drafting from the sketch, plans; then ask students to return to their writing
• conferences to refine: e.g., two columns for ordinary and interesting words – help students select, ask why
• turning the entries into poems…wow!

Favorite part – K poem, Shawanna

I had a seashell.

My baby brother broke it.

The song came out.

The song wont’ come back.

Linda Christensen, Celebrating the Student Voice

• read Rayford’s song
• strategies for teaching with Rayford’s song (or any poem or song with powerful lyrics)
• share poem with students, do text rendering (underline words, phrases, that strike them) then create oral group poem reading these
• reflect in free-write, personal response [or take a line for a walk] – read
• read “His Story” (similar to Mincey’s My People…)