Fourth Grade Poetry Labs

Our fourth grade introduced their poetry curriculum through Poetry Labs. Children were divided into five mixed groups and each of the teachers developed a different sensory experience. They planned a morning of exploratory activities for the children to connect taste, touch, smell, vision and sounds to memories and emotions.  Children moved from class to class for a brief presentation and lab focusing on each of the five senses.  The poetry labs were a source of inspiration and "seed ideas" for future poems.

Lemon

by Delilah Shapiro

Scrunch

my lips

blink

madly

soften

phew

In Josh’s lab, the children listened to Miles Davis’ It Never Enters My Mind and recorded how the music affected them – images, feelings, memories, etc. Joshua wrote the sound “makes me feel sad like when I left one of my toys when I was little” and Luna’s response was also sad, “like the day I had to give away my cat.” In Dolores’s sight lab, Cully wrote the boa constrictor photo, “scares me to the bones.”  Meanwhile, Talya was in Elissa’s class writing about how the scent of vanilla reminded her of “Pancakes on a January day.”  In Chris’s room, each child had the chance to experience objects, including a piece of deerskin, a pointed chunk of log, nutshells and forest floor objects, and an animal horn. Tallulah thought the animal horn would make a good back scratcher, while Rebecca thought the log looked like the tip of a giant pencil.  In Cora’s workshop, the children participated in a tasting lab, tasting ginger, honey, salt, chocolate, and lemon juice.  This inspired Anna’s description, “the spicy pain of ginger.”

Children learned about poetic devices, including using comparison, onomatopoeia, simile and metaphor.  

    Honey (excerpt)

       By Sophia Kyriacou

taste

sweet like a

lullaby waiting to

be heard

feels smooth and slippery

down my

t

h

r

o

a

t

Consider how much more the students got from being divided into smaller groups and from the careful collaboration of the grade level team.  Know too, that high expectations were set with children being told to “push themselves” to use adjectives to describe the experiences and then connect them to memories.

At The Park (excerpt)

by Dexter Pakula

...at the park

I climb

the smooth

cold columns

I smell

the sticky tint of metal

I hear children running

the soft drumming

I swing to the beat

of the stomping feet

From pre-K through Grade 5, reading and writing poetry is part of the curriculum at BNS. Over the years we find that many children fall in love with poetry, enjoying the rhythms and images of poems, especially when they find poetry allows them a special way to express feelings and memories.

We can hardly wait to hear the poem that will come from this line: I see a thunderstorm silently ker-splashing on the wet ground. 

-From Weekly Letter, Oct 31, 2013 by Anna Allanbrook and poems supplied by 5th Grade team