Teachers, today’s Poetry Month post is for you, offering a simple but effective way to include more poetry study in your classroom.
You have probably heard of (and, hopefully, used) Literature Circles. But you may not have heard
of its cousin, the Poetry Ponderance (which debuted in my book for educators, Teaching Poetry for Pleasure and Purpose). This activity, which is best when used regularly, gives your students practice at looking closely at poems in a non threatening environment. A great time to start is during a unit of work focussed on figurative language or other poetic devices or forms.
You will need a range of poems for your students to read, preprinted so that each student in a group has a copy of the same poem. You can find poems in anthologies (including If I Could Eat the Stars and Right Way Down), in education resources such as Teaching Poetry for Pleasure and Purpose, or in the poetry anthologies and collections which you can find in your school library.
Your students will work in groups of four, and you could have all groups look at the same poem, allocate a different poem to each group or even allow each group to choose a poem.
Before the groups start work, explain the process and the roles which group members will play in the ponderance. It works like this.
Each group member will firstly read the poem individually and prepare for their group role. Then, in their groups of four they will read and discuss the poem, with each member taking a turn before opening up to discussion. Here are the roles:
- Orator: This group member prepares to read the poem to the group at the start of their
ponderance and, later, to the whole class. - Philosopher: This group member tries to figure out the poem’s meaning. If unsure, they can instead write three questions for the group to discuss to try to establish the poem’s meaning.
- Architect: This person looks for how the poem works – identifying poetic techniques and the structure of the poem., and preparing to show at least three different techniques or word choices to the group.
- Empath: Considers how the poem makes them feel, Prepares to explain how they felt, how they think other people might respond, and why.
You can expect that this process will take some scaffolding at first, but repeated daily during a poetry unit, or weekly across the whole school year, you can create a community of knowledgeable poetry enthusiasts. And, as I have said more than once this moth, the world needs more poetry – and poetry lovers.
I’d love to hear from you if you have tried a Poetry Ponderance or any of the other activities featured in Teaching Poetry for Pleasure and Purpose.
