My students need markers, gold leaf and adhesive and presentation boards to use in artistically illuminating their original odes during a poetry unit in our English class.
What do you remember when your teacher told your class you were studying poetry? Most students moan in dismay, but when they are assigned the ode during a unit on poetry, my 10th and 11th grade classes throw themselves wholeheartedly into their work: drafting, critiquing, designing and painting.
My students are from a low-income district in rural upstate NY.
We learn in a district where over half the population of the students qualify for free and reduced lunch. With our state's extreme education cuts in the budgets this year, we are facing major cuts to the extras, the enrichments in our curriculum. My students love to learn and excel when we are doing something hands-on. Because of budget cuts, we don't get a lot of opportunity to do hands-on work that stretches across curriculum areas. My students are somewhat diversified and we are accepting of others with differences. Giving students an opportunity to love education through hands-on work will give them more reasons to excel and reach beyond our little town's boarders to expand their educations beyond high school.
My Project
During a unit on poetry, my students will study Pablo Neruda, his revolutionary South American culture, and his deeply beautiful and moving odes to everyday things. After this work and after my students write, peer edit, and revise their original odes, they will have the opportunity to explore their own celebrations of life through the use of words to make visual art to match their written art by illuminating their texts.
Just like ancient manuscripts with ornate borders and artwork or like the more modern Jan Brett children's books or graphic novels, my students will create artwork that symbolizes their poems and marry the two on a presentation board using paints, markers, and gold leaf. The resulting projects are very beautiful and will be on display at our school's English Fair later in the year. The students work so diligently on these projects and they are so proud of their dedicated work. It would be a shame to see this project go to the wayside because of extreme budget cuts.
Not only will my students get a sense of what it was like to create the ancient texts that scribes labored over so many centuries ago, but they will experience the passion of a revolutionary and the power and delicate precision of a well chosen word.
Students will gain self-confidence and will have a safe outlet for their creative energies. In making these illuminated odes, my students gain unprecedented pride in their work and will feel the joy of publication to the school and community.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Waffle and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.