Essential Questions
What experiences make up who we are?
How do we convey meaning in poetry in sharing it with others?
Standards
CCSS: Choose language that expresses ideas precisely and concisely, recognizing and eliminating wordiness and redundancy.
CCSS: Choose words and phrases for effect.
CCSS: Vary sentence patterns for meaning, reader/listener interest, and style.
I am Poetry Project
In this mini project students wrote two poems about identity, one, a shorter one, combined elements of structured verse poetry inspired by the minimalism of Japanese forms where students used particular parts of speech in a five-line stanza. The diamante poem format in particular was followed where nouns, a gerund, and adjectives are assembled in such a way to create a portrait of the speaker indirectly through images and free association concluding with a synonym or simply a word describing a feeling representing the speaker from the first line. Students were encouraged to provide synonyms for common words to expand their vocabulary and to think on a more symbolic level with language as well.
The other poem was an “I am” poem where students wrote lines derived from topics from their lives, and all starting with “I am” for dramatic effect. Students were free to use a more symbolic approach, “I am my mother,” or a more direct approach, “I am the daughter of my mother,” and to use short lines or longer ones and to arrange these lines in any order that suited them.
Students then read their poems in the sound studio to be recorded for a podcast.
Amy
Angela
Ann
Phin
Bess
Coco
Jorrin
Karl
Abby
David
Gerald
James
Jason
Michael
Ricky
Yuki
