Students will be able to identify differences in poetry forms such as prosedy, sonnets, limericks, and haikus, and write their own.
We are finally, finally back on the same schedule in all classes. No more dual planning, thank goodness. I still have three classes worth of research papers to grade and six classes of common assessment essays, but that’s what the weekend is for, right? Whenever I do the mental math to figure out how much I make an hour, I always stupidly leave out my weekend hours. I reason that I leave the house around 6:30 AM and get home around 6:30 PM, so 12 hours x 5 days = 60 hours…but if I work another ten hours over the weekend, my “hourly” rate goes from $10 to $8.60. Dang. I had no IDEA teachers worked this hard until I was one.
Today’s class was a party day. A POETRY PARTY!! (and therefore not a real party, but they can suck it up)
Me: I have a gift for you today.
Girl: Is it cookies? (I had promised third period cookies weeks ago)
Boy: Pizza?
Girl: Something we can eat?
Me: No.
Boy: Then we don’t want it. It’s probably a quiz.
Me: Ah. Well. I was going to say instead of spending three weeks on poetry like we were supposed to, I was going to do it in three days. But if you don’t want my gift…
Class: No! No! We’re sorry, Mrs. H!
Me: Darn right you’re sorry, ungrateful bunch of monkeys that you are.
Boy: We’re not monkeys…
And so on and so forth. I collected a whole bunch of fantastic youtube videos illustrating prosody (through Taylor Mali’s slam poetry), sonnets, haikus, and couplets, and then we wrote some, using Apples to Apples card as inspiration for when kids went, “Give me a topic, Mrs. H.” Interestingly enough, most of my students had never played Apples to Apples before. I hadn’t gone through the cards before, but one of my students found a blank one (where you write your own) on which one of my college roommates had written something mildly inappropriate. Unfortunately she didn’t know what is meant, and called me over to ask what a “quickie” was. Every day is an adventure! See poetry videos below. 🙂 The goal was so they understood the importance of reading to the punctuation in a poem, the end of the idea, not just the end of the line. I used this example with which most were familiar to illustrate the importance of reading to the end of a line.
Even more good news, my beloved old car for which I am famous went to the doctor today, and I expected to be told I needed new brakes. It has 188,400 miles on it, and the brakes make this awful metallic screeching sound that sounds an awful lot like metal-on-metal-should-have-sparks-melting-my-tires sound. Turns out a lot of that area was just really rusty, probably due to several winters sitting outside in the Midwest. The mechanic cleaned them up, I owe a mere $40 instead of hundreds, and my students will have the pleasure to continue making fun of my old car, minus the awful awful sound you hear when I leave the parking lot. Yay!
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Haha! I bet they loved those videos!