Collaborative Poetry- A Post from a Guest-Blogger

Matt Pascucci is a fifth-grade teacher in our district. Over the summer, he taught at our Summer Writing Academy and is sharing some of the work his students did. 

I spent the last week teaching as a part  of a week-long writing camp.  This year’s theme was “The Power of Poetry.”  The best part of this year is that we were afforded flexibility in exploring poetry in whatever facet worked best.  The worst part was having only a period of five days to convey everything there is to know about poetry… ever. 

Obviously this was impossible, so my planning ended up being driven by two things… the first, I wanted the kids to have fun and enjoy poetry, the second was that I wanted the kids to push themselves into deeper thinking while being unbound by the typical formats of poetry taught in schools.  We did not write haikus, we did not write about me poems, we did not write limericks, and acrostics were not invited.

In order to get my 5^th going into 6^th graders using their brains thinking in the lyrical quality of free verse, we spent the first day making poetry, rather than writing it.  I wanted the kids to focus on crafting poetry using other people’s words, manipulating them into their own meaning.  We created blackout poetry in order to discover a different meaning hidden among other words, found poetry in order to play with white space by inserting line breaks and stanza breaks, and we played a few other games using the words of other authors. 

The next step was helping the students to get used to looking at the world through their “poet’s eyes.”  We took a walk around the outside of the school, spending time observing objects and trying to create our own poems from varying perspectives.  This second day led to an activity inspired by a type of “found poetry” we had previously done independently.  In a fairly lackluster activity, the kids read the works of various poets, jotting down individual lines that really spoke to them.  They then rearranged those lines in order to create a new poem.  These poems were fine, but they lacked inspiration and emotion.  However, I was inspired.

I decided to have the kids apply this idea to a collaborative production. In small groups, each student started by writing a four line poem on the topic of writing poetry.  The poems were pretty good, they each had small bits of flair, emotion, and musicality.  The real magic came afterwards.

The students then cut their poems into little strips, so that each line of the poem was on its own strip.  Next, the group laid out all of their lines on a table.  From these lines, the kids crafted a new poem, rearranging, adding, and removing lines. 

Not only was I amazing by the quality of the product, but also by the true act of revision taking place. 

As a fifth grade teacher, I often find that the hardest element of revision for my students is the rearrangement, and especially the deletion of writing and ideas within a piece.  For some reason (I don’t know if it was the fact that this was a poem, or if it came down to the freedom of playing with their group members ideas) but the kids very democratically and thoughtfully deleted, rearranged, and added ideas to make their poem the best it could be.

Below is an example of one of the collaborative poems that resulted from their work:

To Express a Poem

Staring at the Blank Page

What to write? I 

A fountain of words

Are racing in my head.

What to write?

Swarming until you find your hand moving

A stream of words

flows from the mind of the writer

and onto the blank white page

and you are writing poetry.

I'm looking forward to finding ways to weave in more poetry instruction throughout the year. Students not only enjoy it, but they also learn so much about both reading and writing by studying the craft of poetry.

Thanks for the opportunity to share--

Matt

Slice of Life: Providing Learning Opportunities for High School Volunteers

Every Tuesday, the writing community of Two Writing Teachers hosts Slice of Life. All are welcome to participate by linking up posts or commenting on other participants. 

The week of our annual Summer Writing Academy is upon me, and although I don't love giving up a week of summer to work, I am excited to watch how a week of poetry unfolds. I am also looking forward to working with the four high school students who are volunteering. The first year I ran the program, one of the high school students gave me feedback that she wished she learned more about teaching. Since then, I have carved out time each day to meet with the volunteers and give them an easily explainable teaching move to try out as they work in the program. This morning, I am thinking about what those sessions will be this year. 

As of right now, I am thinking that today I will go over the structure of a conference, giving each of them some of my pink cards that have places to write compliments, teaching points, and challenges. Tomorrow, I will use Responsive Classroom to teach them about morning meetings and then encourage their teachers to allow them to run an activity. Thursday will be a quick review of growth mindset principles and key language using some key pages from Opening Minds by Peter Johnston (one of my favorite all-time professional books), and Friday will be about reading both published and student work with love and respect. I love the work of Valerie Worth for teaching them to read words with emotion and admiration. 

 I'm never sure of the highest leverage teaching points for my high school volunteers or of the correct sequence for them. As with teaching in a writing classroom, I find myself wanting to teach everything all at once, and I know that this is not good practice. 

If anyone out in my wonderful slicing world has other suggestions that high school volunteers who are interested in education could absorb, practice, and appreciate, please share! This part of our program tends to get underemphasized, but I love encouraging their interest in children and teaching. 

Happy Slicing,

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

Jen Vincent at Teach Mentor Texts and Kellee Moye and Ricki Ginsburg at Unleashing Readers cohost It's Monday! What are You Reading? weekly on their blogs.  To see what others are reading and recommending each Monday, or to participate, be sure to head over to these blogs.

Each summer, we offer a Summer Writing Academy for students who love to write. We organize and plan the academy with specific themes in mind, and this year, we are planning to emphasize the power of story in relaying opinions and messages. Additionally, we will study mentor texts that celebrate people and places, and I am predicting that many of our students will write some wonderful pieces along the lines of When I Was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant, one of my all time books and one that celebrates the magic of a place. 

Today, I spent some time in the library looking for and rereading books that contain opinions, as well as books that celebrate people or places. 

I'm guessing that most of you have read Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson, but it was wonderful to read it and think about it as a book with a strong opinion that so many children share. We should all treat each other with kindness is a popular claim for elementary opinion writing, but Each Kindness is a beautiful example of how narrative writing can express that claim.

Along similar lines is Roller Coaster by Marla Frazee. We usually use this book as a mentor text for teaching students about the power of small moment stories, but this book also has an opinion about trying new things that is embedded within the story. I forgot about The Wednesday Surprise by Eve Bunting as a book we could since it is such a beautiful narrative about never being too old to learn something new. 

Sometimes opinion writers can write essay-like pieces to celebrate people and places, but we can also express those opinions with narrative pieces. Sweet, Sweet Memory by Jacqueline Woodson, My Great Aunt Arizona by Gloria Houston, What You Know First by Patricia MacLachlan, and Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox are all books that I am looking forward to using as mentor texts for celebrating places and people. (And don't forget When I Was Young in the Mountains!)

Dr. Seuss is an author who embeds strong opinions, and his work will definitely find a place in our Summer Academy. If you have some other favorites or suggestions, please share!

Happy reading!

Summer Writing Takeaways Part 2: Ideas for Next Summer

Our Summer Writing Academy is only one week long, but is packed full of writing and learning for both teachers and students. Last week, I wrote about some of the activities that we did with the students throughout the week in Part 1. This was my second year of running it, and I worked hard to have the learning be impactful for teachers, as well as for students. This post has more to do with the reflections, insights and learning that we had as teachers. Each day, we met after the students left and exchanged ideas for a half hour. The conversations were unstructured and organic, led by a talented five-some of writing teachers.

This year, we focused our students on narrative writing, but with a more imaginative twist than most get within our academic year's curriculum. For example, many of the students developed their main characters as animals, a la Poppleton, Frog and Toad, or the Lighthouse Family. I saw several stories with mermaids and princesses. (Yes, there are many more girls than boys who opt into a summer writing camp!) Other students had characters and action figures come to life.

One of the goals for this summer was to have students complete at least one story that could be entered into the state writing contest, and this goal became the topic of conversation and debate for the teachers after the last session.

• Did the pressure of completing a piece motivate students?
• Did the product become more important than the process?
• Could students have learned better/more deeply if they had been working on parts of stories each day, rather than trying work through one story each day?

As a group, we value process for these students and without planning to, we found ourselves planning for next year's writing academy. The teachers all loved Gail Carson Levine's Writing Magic, and if you have not read it, I highly recommend it as summer reading! Our proposed theme for next year? Learning from the magic of the masters to develop our writing toolkits. Each day we could have author studies, focusing on their expertise on certain aspects of story telling.

For right now, we are envisioning:
Day 1: Captivating beginnings (Jon Scieszka or Eve Bunting)
Day 2: Plot development (Kevin Henkes)
Day 3: Bringing the setting to life (Patricia MacLachlan)
Day 4: Voice, dialogue and emotions (Cynthia Rylant)
Day 5: Lasting impressions (Mem Fox or Patricia Polacco)

And so, next year is evolving into developing a magical writing toolkit by studying the masters. No, we may not complete pieces, but we will send students of all levels off with tools and skills that will help them in all writing genres throughout the year!

Bring on Summer Writing Academy 2015!

Takeaways and Ideas from our Summer Writing Academy: Part 1

Each summer, our district runs a week-long writing camp for students entering second through sixth grade. The program is designed especially for students who enjoy writing and students spend a significant portion of the four hours with some sort of writing utensil in their hands (or at their fingertips.) This summer, we went with a narrative theme, encouraging our writers to bring inanimate things to life. The children loved thinking about the thoughts, conversations, and conflicts that their stuffed animals, dolls, toys, and pets could have. Most of our curriculum has students create personal narrative or realistic fiction stories, so there are not many opportunities for them to create talking turtles, or magical fairies, or heroic unicorns or mischievous elephants. All of these creatures, and many more showed up in stories last week. 

Each day, the five teachers had the opportunity to share what they had done, and we compiled a list of some of the successful activities. I have tried to categorize it in this post. 

Community building activities:

1. Compliment Posters: Each child had a piece of chart paper or construction paper, and the teacher allotted time for students to write compliments to that child about his/her writing. I could see this working for individual writing units over the course of the year, as students would definitely run out of space if the poster lasted too long. The students loved reading the specific compliments, comments, and feedback from their writing community!
2. Interview each other: Take a few minutes to come up with questions to ask each other, then a few minutes to interview, and a few minutes to share. This was a wonderful exercise for speaking and listening, but it also helped students get to know each other.
3. Five Finger Introduction: Each finger represents something that one child will tell another child, or a group of children. (Favorite food, favorite game…) What each finger represents offers a way to differentiate the strategy, tailoring the activity to the ages and cognitive abilities of students.

Word Games:

1. One syllable adjective game: “Describe a place using all one-syllable words.” The upper elementary students went on with this game by having it turn into a two-syllable word game, then a three-syllable word game and so on...We had a lot of laughs with this one.
2. Five Senses Activity: from Show Don’t Tell- Act out certain adjectives that describe feelings, then write it. ex: sad.
3. Salad bowl game: everyone writes as many words within a topic (people, adjectives, places, food…) on strips of paper, folds the strips, and places them into a bowl. Then, each player gets a turn to describe as many  words on strips as they can in one minute. All the students at all levels loved this game, and it differentiates itself, as students write down what they know. Teachers could also differentiate by allowing more or less time for individual students.

For promoting more writing-prompts and inspiration:

1. We were all inspired by Gail Carson Levine's Writing Magic, and used many of the prompts and inspirational ideas found at the end of each chapter. One of the teachers' favorites was at the end of Chapter 6: Using the point of view of a puppy or kitten, pretend you are just able to know what everything is, using all of your senses. Describe what his eyes, nose, ears, tongue, and paws tell him. Does he understand everything, or does he misunderstand some things?
2. Autobiographical poem:
1. Line 1: Name
2. Line 2: Words that describe you
3. Line 3: What you like
4. Line 4: What you don’t like
5. Line 5: Movies or books that you have seen or read
6. Line 6: Goals that you have or something that you want to learn to do
3. “List with a twist”: Write all of the words that you can think of about a specific place, emotion, etc. Then, without using any of those words, describe that same place, emotion, etc. ex: beach, sad… What incredible writing came out of this exercise. One student returned to her notebook to find the entry that she had written about the beach so that she could create a better sense of her beach setting within her story. I highly recommend this exercise for all levels of writers.
4. Group poem: Each person writes one line, then passes the paper to the next person. Note: This activity works especially well with a title or a unifying theme.
5. The Scholastic Story Starter is a resource that I stumbled upon when I was looking for electronic prompts. My daughter was in the program, and last night, she went back to the Story Starter and created a prompt for herself. I even heard her tell her friends about it. If you have a chance, I highly recommend checking out this resource; it offers different genres, as well as different grade levels. Our students loved it!

We already have ideas brewing for next year that are based on several of the reflections from this year. If any of you have other favorite writing activities, word games, or sources of inspiration, we always welcome  new ideas. 

Happy writing, and happy summer!