Poetry is no mystery to me. I immerse myself in it. As a matter of fact, I teach it to all ages, and use it as a back door therapy for some.. But with my first graders, it's just a beautiful chance to play, play, play. Word play is like opening up a package at Christmas that you have no idea what's in it. It's discovery. It's delight. If nothing else, I want my kids to find that words pack so much meaning that can open another world to you. We explore free verse and rhyme and alliteration and onomotapoeia....metaphors and similes. It may come as a surprise to you, but I believe first graders live in metaphor. They notice details us grown ups have long forgotten. One thing Lucy Calkins does is talk about "seeing things with fresh eyes." This is the very definition of a first grader.
The other day I was showing a first grader how he had made a hinge with geo boards, and the rubber bands shot out and across the rooms. One of the kiddos said, "You launched it!" I couldn't help but laugh with uncontrolable laughter; because yes, that's exactly what I did!
I have some great tools I have learned over the years about Poetry. I would like to share bits and pieces here. For reluctant writers, there's a tool called a Poetry Bowl. In this bowl, you put vivid verbs and intersting adjectives and some common nouns students love like mom and dad and sun and grass and watch them come alive! The purpose of the bowl is for the kids to "play" with words. A Common place/time we have for playing with words is during Daily Five, in which one of our jobs is "Word Work." You can start the bowl by color coding some interesting words you hear and think, that's amazing language or a favorite word? What are verbs you use in cooking, working on a car, exercising? There are vivid verbs all around. I found that sometimes for these younger kiddos, it's nice to color code them. Then they can visually see ways to arrange and try to get more variety. Stir the words up in the bowl and just start mixing and matching with no care. There's no right or wrong, just exploration....kind of like spelunking with words.
This exercise really helped one of my "stuck" poets who happens to be more literal than poetic. I know he likes race cars, so I had him write down every word he could about racing and then he just mixed the pile up. It was a challenge at first to get him to play, until I reminded him that he could use time order of things to organize it. We got a pretty great poem out of it! Check this out by Mason:
Races
By Mason
Helmets on
Start
your
Engines!
Ready,
set, go
Slow
cars
Blown
tires
Pitstops
Mechanics
Crashes
Catch
on fire
Yellow
flag
Curvy
curves
Green
flag
Nascar
Fast
engines
Checkered
flag
If you adults want to try this on for yourself, cut random words from magazine and put them in a bowl and sit at a coffee table and just arrange and rearrange.
I will have more tips later involving ways to use metaphors in centers and other fun poetry/word exercises. Enjoy your play!
