Trying out different strategies for writing poetry is like trying on shoes at your shoe store of choice. They may not fit quite right, or, pinch your creativity. But each strategy (or shoe) that you try on teaches you something about who you are as a poet; what your own sense of poetic style may be. Like a pair of shoes in the shoe store, you try the strategy on, walk up and down the aisle in it a few times, before you really decide if it's the right fit for you. Even if it doesn't fit quite right, we learn what inspires us to write and what inhibits our ability to create. The strategy I tried this week is one I'm still walking up and down the aisle of the store in, trying to decide if it's the right fit for me. I will probably try this strategy another time or two, or tweak it a little bit, before making my final decision on how it fits me as a poet.
This week I tested out the "Six Room Poem" strategy from Georgia Heard's Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School (pg. 67-74). Below I will share my process for implementing her strategy to my own writing.
The Process:
I began by creating the six rooms in my writers notebook like Heard has pictured on page 69 of Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School . Then I found my inspiration. Coming down my driveway on my way home from work, these Daffodils immediately caught my eye and they were great inspiration for writing poetry. Next, I began to fill out the rooms, building my "floor plan" for my poem. These were only my initial thoughts and I didn't quite feel ready to turn them into a poem yet, so I went back to each room and spent more time thinking about the Daffodils. That still didn't feel quite right, so I went back to each room a third time to make notes for myself about how I might like to use the words I have in each room. During the drafting phase of what I like to call my "floor plan", I used a thesaurus to help me think deeper and more descriptively about the daffodil and my experience seeing it when I got home. https://www.thesaurus.com/ has become my greatest tool for amping up the vocabulary in my writing. I love to use it to try out different descriptive words, and even if I don't use the word from the thesaurus it can lead me to a word that is more comprehensive of the experience I am trying to convey to the reader. Then I finally began to take the pieces from each room and put the poem together.
On the left is my first draft of the poem, the right is my initial thoughts on what I thought needed to change formatting wise to improve the way my poem is read. Below you will see my "final" (is anything ever really done?) product. As I was copying my poem onto a new page to fix spacing and formatting there were a few words and phrases I decided to change to make my poem flow better and describe my experience more accurately. I also removed the question at the end of the poem, just a personal preference. A strategy is like a shoe, sometimes you have to loosen a buckle or tighten the shoe laces for them to feel comfortable. Check it out!
Classroom Applications:
The best part about the "Six Room Poem" is that it can be adapted to have more and less rooms and you can decide which rooms to include. The topic of each room as well as the quantity of rooms can increase grade level appropriateness. If you are working with grades K-2nd, maybe they only have 3-4 rooms to consider and their topics might be memory, image, sound, and feelings. While if you are working with upper elementary (3rd-5th), you might have them do 6-8 rooms where they consider image, sound, feelings, repeating words, touch, taste, smell, interweave another poets writing into their own, voice, or they may use a room to focus on creating similes or metaphors. The combinations and possibilities are abounding with this strategy. Experimenting with different rooms gives the writer new lenses to discover and apply to this poem and future poems too!
Shared Writing:
The "Six Room Poem" strategy can also be used as a shared writing experience for the whole class. Prepare your six rooms on the whiteboard, SMARTboard, SharpBoard, or anchor chart paper. Provide students with an image that they can imagine in their mind. Make sure to pick a image that they have all seen. Maybe the image you provide is somewhere in the school, you can tell them and show them the image. Once your students have had time to think about the image, visit each room with them. What is the image? What sounds are there? How is the lighting? How does it make you feel? What questions do you have about the image? What do you wonder? Are there any words we want to repeat? After visiting each room together, have students give you recommendations on how to organize the poem with the information we just uncovered. To provide more opportunities for participation and engagement, you can write a draft or two of the "Six Room Poem" together. This demonstrates drafting to your students and provides each of them an opportunity to voice their idea and see it tested out. Next, there are two options. These options can be selected based on grade level, support needs, and interest level in poetry. If your students are still warming up to poetry, it might be nice to work on this new way of expression with a buddy. If your students already love poetry they might prefer to work independently and produce their own poem.
Here are some options:
Have students work with a partner to craft a new poem with the rooms we already established
Have students work independently to craft a new poem with the rooms we already established
Have students work with a partner to co-author a "Six Room Poem"
Have students work independently to craft their own "Six Room Poem"
No matter what you choose, provide students with the time to share their poetry. Allow them to read it aloud, have a buddy read their work aloud, or you, the teacher can read it aloud too. Don't forget to be working on your own "Six Room Poem" too. Your students will be more likely to try poetry if you are trying it too!
Meet the Author:
This is Georgia Heard, the author of Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School
Click the image below to buy her book and learn more strategies for teaching poetry!
Comments