Seriously, Week Three???

I don't know how we've come this far in this short of a time. WOW! This year is flying already, and I guess it's because I'm having so much fun!  This past week, we went through a series of poetry stations, delving deeper into the connections between poetry and the river.

Students typed and submitted to me via email their "Battle of Redwood Triolets".  They were a lot of fun to hear and read.  I hope they were fun to write!

One station asked students to imagine what would have inspired a poet to write a particular haiku.  They had to write a paragraph that painted the scene that could have been the source of the haiku situation that was ultimately boiled down into a haiku.

At another station, students read a selection from Mark Twain, "Two Ways of Seeing a River."  Once they read and discussed the reading as a group, they sought out examples of figurative language that Twain used in the piece.

They did a Read! Listen! Write! activity.  They read a selection by Pat Mora, which talked about the nature of poetry and the resemblance to a river.  Then they listened to Langston Hughes talk about the inspiration for his poem, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers."  And finally, they came up with five to ten ways that poetry was like a river and explained how poetry did the things a river did.  For example, they might say that a river can be deep and at times shallow and a poem can be deep in meaning and at times shallow in meaning (no deeper meaning, surface level).

The last station was Poetry Poker.  Word cards are dealt to the players who have a chance to discard and try to build the strongest hand possible with the five words they have.  In the end they manipulate the words to create a line of poetry.

When we finished with the stations, I performed a Miguel Pinero poem for the class.  We then looked at various examples of performance poetry.  Each group randomly selected one of the poems I had picked out to perform this upcoming week.

We've just been building, building, building.  I'm excited to see what comes next.