Students from Alissa Weinstein’s class at Charter School of Morgan Hill are poets, and now they know it.
This past Saturday, 24 third graders recited their poems at Booksmart in front of classmates, parents and patrons at the local bookstore as part of their school project.
In preparation for the public poetry reading, the 8- and 9-year old scholars studied literary devices such as personification, repetition, rhythm, metaphor, mood and sensory language, according to Weinstein.
“In order to model for how a poet manipulates language to create a certain effect, we read poems by a number of professional poets including Maya Angelou, Carl Sandburg, Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti, and Valerie Worth,” explained Weinstein, who provided her students with dozens of poetry books and anthologies from our classroom and public libraries. “We analyzed poems to determine how poets create mood.”
Students collected information in poems that generated a “calm” and “excited” feeling, while also learning about the use of whitespace and line breaks to force the reader to change the speed at which a poem is read.
“We also did hands-on explorations where the students went outside and honed in on one particular sense to perceive their surroundings,” Weinstein said. “Then, they jotted down words to describe what they heard/saw/felt/tasted depending upon the specific exercise that day.”
Weinstein then had her students digitally publish their works on a class blog using the website kidblog.com. Each student made a profile and, as a member of the class blog, was able to publish and comment on their classmates’ poems once posted.
After publishing their poetry, the last part was to read them aloud at Booksmart, which marked the second time Weinstein has asked her class to do so. She admitted at first her students were “quite nervous” about reading in public, but the blog eased their tensions and they were excited to share their words Saturday.
“My goal in teaching this poetry unit was to awaken their innate poetic abilities,” Weinstein said. “I wanted them to realize that poetry is accessible to all people, no matter how old, and that it can be a powerful tool of communication.”
