In This Class: We Read Poetry Daily
One easy way to incorporate a daily poetry habit is the simple and elegant bell-ringer. It’s a beautiful segue from the hustle and bustle of class change to the meditative vibe of your writing class.
This low-stakes reflective practice only asks students to listen to poetry, notice language, and reflect on it.
1) As students come in, the poem is on the board. I use a Google Slide Deck which I load each Sunday night with the week’s poems. Here is a sampler SlideDeck that has ten poems that I’ve used sometime within the last month.
2) To kick off the bell ringer, I read the poem out loud or I play the poet reading the poem from the Poetry Foundation archives of audio readings. The reading provides a central focus for the whole class in a way that just allowing everyone to read the poem silently does not. It also helps students hear and internalize the power of the end of a line and how lineation is used by poets as part of the total expressive vehicle.
2) After reading, I make a few “notice” and “did you see..” statements. The goal is not to teach, interpret, unpack, or analyze the poem, only to draw students' eyes to particular parts of the poem.
Notice where the lines end.
Notice how much work the title does in this poem.
Notice how the poet uses punctuation.
Notice this word. And this one. And this one.
Notice this image. And that one. And that one.
Did you see any patterns?
Did you see any internal structure?
Did you hear any music in the reading?
3) Using their phone to scan the QR code, students access a Check-in Form with three questions. Last Name, First Name, and One Question: What was your favorite line or phrase in this poem, and why?
4) Extension: You could read the poem again, or have someone else read the poem. You could also ask students to steal a favorite line or phrase to use a title of their own poem, a practice we call “talk a line for a walk.” (I’ll write a post on this next week.)
