Lesson Plan II

Materials:

Several selections of poetry that display rigid meter
Bongos


This lesson is aimed at teaching students how to recognize meter in poetry. It gives students a concrete way of hearing the beat – and allows those that are kinetically/musically intelligent to practice those abilities.
Students will be asked to identify the meter in a selection of poetry. They will be asked to draw it out with the typical stressed/unstressed symbols. They will then be given a set of bongos to play it out to ensure they have gotten it correct.

A lesson in Haikus and Hike-Us

Children’s chalk red, blue
Rain falls down fast washing the
Colors, shapes away

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Between two sidewalks
green sprouts up strong, alive in
the concrete waste land

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His lips, velvet covered granite, silence my weak excuses quickly.

The soft clean scent of him remains even after long days have gone by.

His copper fleck’d gaze burns as I sit across the bar missing his kiss.

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His breath smelled sour, sweet, like pine, like childhood camps and Christmas fires.

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I snap her scratching pencil, ahh, now I can finally read in peace.

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License and registration please the handsome officer asks me now.

Lesson Plan

Sense Poetry Unit

Rationale:
Good writing begins with good observations. This lesson focuses on challenging students to observe something extraordinary in the everyday.


Activities:
In this lesson I will challenge students to not only see something but to smell, feel, taste and hear it. I will bring in a variety of everyday items such as tennis balls, snow globes, milk etc. and ask students to write what they observe.

Students will asked to write everything they can for each of their five senses.

They will then do a free write to think about childhood memories that involved that item.

They will then practice writing the childhood memory poem.

Prose Poem

I really should call more, but when the phone rings and the caller i.d. reads, “mom” I silence its shrill voice and return to the dishes. The water leaves my hands an angry red but I don’t remove them, instead I turn the hot water back on rising the temperature further. I’ll call her back tomorrow, I tell myself.

Childhood Memory Poem

Her paper hands brushed her silver streaked hair

curls whisper against her bare shoulder.

I held my breath. Stretching to the tips of my toes,

a streak of yellow light peaks through the bathroom door

she has carelessly left ajar.

In her hand she holds a mirror

the raised roses press into her pink palm

its edges dark from age, though not enough

to hide the soft, elegant line of her cheeks.

Nor blur the deep lines surrounding her mossy eyes.

Carved by laughter and worry.

From silly songs and first kisses.

From drunken husbands, passed out on the bathroom floor,

bloody fists beat against the door, “Let me in, dammit!”

From lost children, dead before they could speak.

She is so beautiful, even then.

It still smells like lilac and baby powder as I quietly

creep in.

I stretch to reach Grandma’s mirror,

It is still warm from her skin.

I need to use both hands, its heft too much for my tiny fists.

I stare. My plain face, the broad cheeks covered in freckles.

And I wish I was beautiful too.