Week 4 Readings

February 14, 2010 · Filed under Class Reading Responses, Poetry

Flicker Flash by Joan Graham is a fascinating book of poetry. Her integration of art and words with objects is very creative and pleasing to a reader’s eye. My two favorite poems in the book are Campfire and Lighthouse.

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I have always been the most comfortable with using acrostics in class when dealing with poetry. There are several novels that my grade level uses where we construct an acrostic to describe a particular character. However, I have never thought of making the acrostics rhyme, nor have I thought of using different variations. My favorite acrostic is “Impalas in Peril”. I think it’s my favorite, because it was like solving a puzzle to find the 5th arrangement!

Silver Seeds  was another cute example of how acrostics can be used. Poetry is often thought of as a difficult genre for students. I think Silver Seeds would be excellent to use with younger grades.

The first paragraph in the article Extending Acrostic  Poetry into Content Learning: A Scaffolding Framework definitely described the poetry experiences in my classroom. As I mentioned before, acrostics have been my poetic form of choice. I agree that modeling is crucial for students, as well as showing them that teachers struggle to compose their thoughts too. Although I have model acrostics, I have never “immersed” my students with acrostics by other poets. Honestly, I never realized that books like African Acrostics and Silver Seeds  existed. I can see where providing such examples would build the students’ knowledge base. I loved the example in the article of integrating acrostics and informational text. What a neat way for students to report what they have learned about a specific topic. Next month my class will do a study of Blackbeard and other pirates, and I can’t wait to incorporate acrostics into our unit. Great article!!!

In chapter 9 of Elliott’s text, I was reminded that in order for children to acquire poetic language they must borrow words from other writers. Students would benefit from having a place, like a journal, to collect their words for future use. They also need to be reminded often to refer to their collection of borrowed words when drafting and composing.