Poetry Reading

We were asked to bring our favorite poems into class to share with our fellow students. When I first hear this, I had no idea what poem to bring in because I am not much of a poetry person. I have always had a hard time understanding what a poem is trying to tell me. I ended up choosing the poem "A Light In The Attic" by Shel Silverstein. I decided to choose this poem because it is the title of one of Shel Silverstein's books of poems. Last semester when I finished field, my cooperating teacher gave me this book of poems. She was the most influential cooperating teacher that I have ever had, so to receive this as a gift was truly inspiring. I chose to use this poem since it is the title of the poetry book. There are a lot of good poems in this book. My field teacher used poetry books by Shel Silverstein almost daily. She would tell the students to give her a page number and she would read the poem that was on that page. 

When we came into class on the day of our poetry cafe, we realized that our classroom looked a little different than normal. There were four tables set up with four chairs around each of the tables. The tables were covered with black table cloths and had a different floral arrangement. As we were sharing our poems in our groups, soft music was playing in the background. It was really a neat experience. After we read all of our poems in our table, we swapped tables so we would hear other classmates' poems.

I would definitely consider doing something like this in my own classroom. I think that poetry is a hard topic for some students because I was one of those students. However, I think that this was a fun way to teach poetry. I prefer something like this instead of having students just read poems aloud to the entire class. There are some students who are shy and have a hard time memorizing poetry, so instead of having them just memorize a poem, this is more beneficial. It teaches them how to read poetry and how to listen to others read poetry. I think that this also helps students see that there are many different types of poems. I also liked that we got to choose our own poems instead of having Syd just choose poems for us. This allowed us to come up with a poem that was important to us.

Want to know more about using poetry in your classroom? Click here!



Art Blog Post #6