Poetry through Music!

As you may remember, Islesford School is one of our favorite island schools to collaborate with in the realm of writing! Writing was actually the FIRST subject that we ever collaborated on and what much of our collaboration through the TLC was built on! Pretty cool that we are still finding time to do it, three years later!

This past week we started in on a new writing project... POETRY! (insert student groans!)

At the beginning of our lesson, we had the kids go in rounds saying the first thing that came to mind when they heard the word "poetry." I typed the words they said into the super cool site, wordle.net, and we created this word collage! As you can see some of the words the kids brainstormed were pretty out there... my personal favorite is "ugggggggh."

We took some time to look at the collage we created and thought about our ideas of what poetry means to us and our own personal lives. THEN we broke up into two groups. One group stayed on the Tanberg with Ms. Eysnogle from Islesford and the other group skyped with me.

Quinn was with Ms. Eysnogle and three other Islesford students.

Dalton was with me and these good looking kiddos! We had asked all of the students to bring either a favorite song or poem to class that meant something to them. All but one student ended up bringing songs which sparked some very fun conversations about how songs really are poetry set to music.

In our small groups each student took a turn sharing their song. After the song was shared, the person who brought the song remained silent while the rest of the group answered the following three questions:

1. What do you think the song is about?

2. What in the song did you relate or respond to?

3. Why do you think this person wanted to share this song?

After the whole group answered all the questions, we invited the presenter to share their answers. It was a really fun activity to hear how different people respond to written word and it also ended up being a really fun exercise for the kids to learn new things about each other!

We looked at the lyrics up close and were able to identify many elements of poetry in the different songs! We found metaphors, similes, alliterations, and even personification!

Here's my group listening to a jamming tune! I love how into this lesson they all were!

At the end of the lesson we came back as a whole group and created another word collage... this time using words we think of when we think of poetry now. Although, "boring" still made this list... I think, overall, we got the kids excited about the types of poetry we are going to be studying and writing this trimester!