Pre-writing to Inspire Poetry

Two weeks into the poetry unit and the creative juices are (mostly) flowing. This is my favorite unit to teach and I think that has a big effect on the quality of the kids' work.

For the first two weeks I've taught figurative language, imagery and poetic devices. We've read at least one poem a day from my former students. This is always a great hook: they read the work of kids they know and think, "Hey, if she could do this, I could do it!"

We do some pre-writing and return to our pre-writing from the beginning of the year. We return to the Heart Map (an Atwell activity) where students mine their hearts and memories for things, people, places, events, hobbies, animals, etc. that are important to them or have influenced them in their lives. We created our Heart Maps at the beginning of the year and kept them in our journals.

We did another mapping activity at the beginning of the year to brainstorm ideas for personal or literary writing. We drew maps of a house or place in our memories - this activity came from George Ella Lyon, former poet laureate of Kentucky. After they draw their Memory Maps, the students focus on one room of the house and list all the memories they have of that room. From there they free-write and wait for an idea for a poem to surface.

For another pre-writing activity, we also read George Ella Lyon's "Where I'm From," and organized the precise nouns on a web graphic organizer. To help the students understand precise nouns (as opposed to general), I use the example of "a tree" as compared to "an old, knotted oak" or "an sticky pine tree." Once we identify the nouns Lyon used to show (rather than tell) where she's from, the students complete their own web to show where they are from. I circulate and push them to make their details more specific, their descriptions richer and more concrete. We focused a bit more on "show-don't-tell" and when I confer with the students, that's one thing I often look for.

With just this front-loading and pre-writing, here's a student's rough draft that he sent home with me tonight:

Great-Grandpaw's Attic

Climbing into the attic
Of my great-grandpaw's old house
Investigating everything
Like a thief find the jewels.

Towers of old torn up boxes
Stacked up so high
Filled with the memories
Of a man we call pepaw.

Old silver war medals
Kept in lock boxes
All dirty and smudged
From my fingerprints

The train set you made me
For the 10th Birthday
You never saw,
Complete with figures
Of both me
And of you, too.

- William

Clearly, William was inspired and he "got" the idea of the precise noun. Here's another student for whom some other inspiration is needed:

I am from the food
in the kitchen the
cool-aid in the refrigerator
the fresh smell of mac'n'
cheese the taste of green
beans makes me go back
for more. And rib's
going on the grill

- Joseph

For students like Joseph who haven't been inspired by the above activities or the poems I've shared with them, I plan to use some spoken word poetry tomorrow. Synthia Shelby, our school's literacy liaison with the district, popped in my class the other day and did a quick spoken word poetry session with them. I saw many of my reluctant writers perk up and pick up their pencils. And it was within fifteen minutes of the end of the day to boot!

I found this fabulous website to share with them tomorrow: SpokenWordz.info. I'm excited to play Nikki Giovanni's "Hands: For Mother's Day" and "All Eyes on U - For 2Pac Shakur," Maya Angelou's "Phenomenal Woman," and Sage Francis' "Spoken Word From Poetry." We'll listen to these, discuss and return to our own poetry, while I circle the room and confer with students.