Today on the pod, let me walk you through a fun new way of teaching poetic structure. I’m doing it TODAY, and I’m so excited about it, I just had to share it immediately.
I’m just starting to teach Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down, and I’ve got novels-in-verse on display in my classroom. On the side, I’ve previewing Red, White, and Whole and Shook, two new-to-me novels-in-verse that I bought for my classroom library.
Screenshots from Amazon
So between making the display, re-reading Long Way Down, and reading the two new novel-in-verse titles, I’ve got verse on the mind!
Add to that a new arrival to my classroom, a set of magnetic hexagons and magnetic poetry that I was recently gifted as part of a classroom supply grant from The Fashion Foundation. My intention with these materials is to create poetry displays on several levels of my school, where students could take a moment to build a poem.
But as I looked at the magnets, I got to thinking about how they might help students play with line breaks and poetic form and structure. As I moved my own words around, creating my model for one hallway display, it was so quick and easy to re-break my lines in different places. I didn’t have to re-write anything or hit the spacebar a few dozen times to change the way I put the words on the page. I could move them in moments.
And THAT got me thinking about how easy it would be to do the same thing with digital poetry tiles. Even easier, since I could take a slide with my initial poem, duplicate it, change my line breaks, change my spacing, and then duplicate it and do it again.
Let me show you what I mean.
Round One: Write a Poem
For the first part of this activity, students simply write a poem using digital drag-and-drop tiles. Below, you can see the example I created with my Halloween digital poetry tiles.
After students create their first poem, you can teach them some of the craft moves of poetic structure, helping them see how lines can waterfall down a page, be broken up through enjambment, maybe get spaced out to represent physically some idea or theme in the words, like Jason Reynolds does in Long Way Down, for example, when he places words on the page to mimic the movement of an earthquake. This is a great time to teach form, structure, repetition, rhythm, rhyme, and enjambment.
With a new awareness of the craft moves of structure, students can duplicate their slide and experiment with different line breaks and structures.
In a short workshop, these experiments may not be groundbreaking. But they’ll be fun, and a quick and easy way to experiment with many possilibities.
You can even introduce the idea of a concrete poem, having students duplicate their slide again and move their tiles to create a shape which somehow reflects the poem.
After students experiment with duplicating their poems and changing them, invite them to decide and share (in writing or with a partner or small group) which poetic form is most effective for conveying the ideas and mood they are trying to get across.
Here’s another example sequence, going from the tile canvas to the first poem to the final canvas playing with breaks, repetition, and stanza in new ways.
This lesson could fit with any novel-in-verse or poetry unit. Your students will get to create their own poems, learn the nuts and bolts of structure-based craft moves, and build their vocabulary and understanding for discussing the use of spacing, structure and shape on the page to convey added layers of meaning.
Time to Try It
If you’d like to try out a lesson like this, you can check out this post, How to Make Digital Poetry Tiles and grab the gratitude kit there or learn how to make a kit to suit your needs. Lighthouse members, of course, can find the Halloween tiles and a wide range of other kits in the poetry section of The Lighthouse.
