Poetry Every Day

I teach all subjects to a packed classroom of eighth graders in an inner city Chicago public school. Until recently, I felt insecure about reading, writing, and teaching poetry. My poetry instruction occurred mostly at the end of the year as a means to kill time until summer vacation. A class I took recently helped me overcome my fears of poetry, and now it lies at the heart of my curriculum. Students usually analyze poetry for first time in high school when they study for AP tests. Imagine growing up as I did, memorizing a short Shel Silverstein poem in fifth grade and not seeing poetry again until reading Dante’s Inferno. My junior high teachers probably feared poetry or they would have taught with it. I want to use poetry every day in my classroom to enrich and concentrate my language arts instruction. Poetry is the art of language, so it makes sense to use the best our language has to offer to teach reading and writing. Finding poems to teach with is easier than previewing books (I will still use books!) and picking one to teach writing skills like rhythm and parallelism. Having snippets of language to study will focus my lessons, and I will become more efficient at securing text for skills practice. Many students fear writing long essays, and their practice at writing is mostly essay oriented. Writing poetry helps students take a step back to remediate and improve their writing by focusing on words, sentences, main ideas, and transitions, which when combined can become a great essay. The poetry books I chose for this grant are mostly by American authors. My Social Studies curriculum leans heavily on the experiences of Americans, and poems provide well-versed insight into the past lives of soldiers, explorers, thinkers, dreamers, etc. Not only will students read, analyze and write poems, they will also listen to them daily, perform them for others and hopefully publish their own. I am most anxious to dictate poems to students, which helps them focus on listening, handwriting, and language construction. By eighth grade, students should have a great level of language mastery, and from my experience, most do not. I plan to help the teachers at my school overcome their fears of poetry as well. The books I receive will help me provide professional development to my colleagues to broaden the community of English language lovers.