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Instructional time is precious, and as
teachers, we like to know why we are prioritizing certain content. This
lesson will help you understand some of the reasons it is important to
include poetry in your curriculum.
Why Poetry?
We all know
that time is limited, and teachers have to make instructional choices.
Poetry is one of those topics that often gets dismissed as whimsical and
unimportant. However, it is a powerful instructional tool and an
important art to study at any age. Poetry is a way to understand how
language and symbol systems work. It is a worthy expression of
emotion, or deep feelings, and
aesthetics,
or a sense of what is beautiful about the world. High school seniors
Sam and Catherine will tell you what they have gotten out of their study
of poetry over the years.
Sam
remembers his elementary school teachers relying on poetry to build
community. In first grade, they would learn a new poem every Monday. As a
class, they would practice the poem over the course of the week and
have conversations about it. Sometimes they would even sing the poem or
do little dances to its rhythms. Sharing this poetry with his class made
Sam feel as though they were a literate community.
Sam's fourth
grade teacher gave each student a binder for collecting poems they love.
Twice a month, a few students would get a chance to share their
favorite poems with their classmates. This became a great way for Sam
and his classmates to learn about each other's tastes and opinions. Sam
thinks that poetry can be a great help for building community in the
classroom.
Literacy Instruction
Catherine
feels that it was her early teachers' use of poetry that got her off
the ground as a reader. Because poetry often uses language in specific
and unusual ways, it drew her attention to the written word. She
remembers her second grade teacher doing a lot of
cloze activities,
or fill in the blank passages, involving poetry. She also remembers
learning about rhyme and word families by reading poems with rhyme
patterns.
As she got older, Catherine learned to become a more
sophisticated reader via poetry. It was her middle school teachers'
inclusion of poetry that taught her about metaphor, symbolism, and
alliteration. Catherine feels that the lessons she learned about
literacy via poetry have actually made her a more critical reader of all
sorts of genres.
Cultural Experience
Sam
really loves that poetry has given him access to the broader world of
cultural experiences. Now that he is older, he enjoys the fact that he
and his parents know many of the same poems and can talk about their
messages together. In addition, Sam's study of poetry from cultures
other than his own has helped him understand universal truths, as well
as cultural differences. Sam has come to understand that the poetry of a
particular culture, like so much of their artwork, offers a unique and
fascinating window into that world. Now that Sam's younger sister is
getting older and starting to study more poetry on her own, Sam also
finds that their conversations are becoming more interesting and
sophisticated. He is proud to have access to this level
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