Writing poetry II

Kapka Morning Gathering and Literacy | 11/19/2008 | 2.0 hours field work | Present: Kapka students, teachers and myself

Background

This morning I got to witness the little poets continue working on the poems they started the previous day.

Key Observations and Methods

• To get the group going, the teacher recaped the work from the previous day, namely the things that poets do — they see the ordinary world in new and interesting ways, the lay out their poem in an interesting way on the page, spacing words and breaking sentences in ways that lay emphasis where it is needed, making the words flow like a poem. The recap was useful I imagine to refocus the group on the work they have been doing. I imagine it also got the students thinking about their poems. I wonder if it would have been more meaningful at this point to hand out the poems to the students so they could reference them as she went through the recap.

• She then went on to add another thing that poets do and that is write on a topic that they have big feelings about. She captured this quite dramatically by picking relevant examples. This teacher is very good at using examples to convey messages and concepts. She also zeroed into how poets express their big feelings on a subject — by focusing on simple and small everyday objects that can capture the feeling. She read a poem titled 'My Grandma' to exemplify the point further. By this point, the group was beginning to get restless so she organized them to get them going.

• In organizing them differently this day, I realized she was keying off of the energy in the room the previous day. So, she split the group in half with one teacher staying with each group. Then, she created a quiet and cozy space for each group to work in and then she played some soft music, telling students that if they were confering with each other, their sound levels needed to be softer than the music playing.

• The groups got to work each student going back to their poem from the previous day or starting a new one. I stayed with a group of 4 girls. Here's what I noticed …

  • Several of the girls chose to first draw about their poem topic.
    I wonder if they did this unconsciously to get some imagery going about
    their topic. Some of them also seemed to do it to kill time. It is hard
    I imagine for 6 and 7 year olds to do the same task day after day. This
    was their third day working on these poems. That must be exhausting,
    especially if you are stuck.

  • The girls that were close to being done with a poem got done and
    then stayed at that point, not venturing out to start another poem.
    That tells me that this was a hard task for them, not one they enjoyed
    enough to re-engage in it.

  • The girls chatted with each other about poems and other things. This was to be expected.

• The teacher held a conference with one girl during which she helped her capture the essence of the poem she was working on and they completed it together. The teacher then shared the poem with the class. The little girl was beaming as she did this. She was elated at being exemplified in this positive light. I watched her twin sister who was struggling with her own writing. The twin became smaller and smaller as she saw her sister shine while she struggled. This really troubled me. I felt there was something really needed to help the other twin feel better. This makes me wonder about the emotional side of learning and how often it is overlooked in teaching environments. I believe that the emotional side is a big piece of being able to learn. A child who is in an emotionally safe space naturally learns well. Often though, we seem to ignore or overlook the emotional side of learning. Kapka is an exception to this and I know that the situation with the twins was not severe nor overlooked or ignored but this is not always the case. More often than not, our children grow up knowing skills but being emotionally scarred due to our educational practices.

• The class closed with a quick reflection on the day's work. Many students had completed poems. I think the organization of the class into the groups they were in along with the environment of the class helped a lot in this regard. I also think students were finally beginning to get a hang of this whole poetry thing. I spoke to the teacher for a little bit afterwards. She cited the struggle to spell as being one of the biggest hurdle in getting students to write. She had asked them over and over to just use best-guess spelling but some just wont and they stay stuck on a word that they cannot spell. I wonder why this is so. Has someone told these kids at some point that they must get the spelling right? Why else would they get stuck like this? I made a suggestion to the teacher to workaround this — to ask the students that get hung up on spelling to audio record their poems to begin with so they can get their ideas down and keep the flow of their ideas going before they try to transcribe them.

Takeaway(s)

I have been moved by this lesson and how in a simple and step-wise manner the teacher has led the students from not writing poems to writing poems. That is magical to watch. I am struck by the use of examples in these lessons. I am also struck by the difficulties young children have in doing the same task day after day especially when it is a task they did not choose for themselves. And to think that unlike Kapka the vast majority of mainstream education does just that .. enforces learning in subjects and in ways that students have little choice about. Hmm…