Happy Holidays!

We have spent this last week of December working on poem writing and poem analysis.  On Monday, students read a poem titled, "The Chimney Sweeper," and they were asked to "put their thinking on the page."  We then discussed each stanza together.  On Wednesday, we will consider the poetic devices used by William Blake in the poem, and we will learn about line and stanza breaks when writing our own poems.

Over the break, students should be thinking about the poetry project, and which song they might like to select to analyze.  Please email me over the break if you would like to check the appropriateness of your song: msbarsky@yahoo.ca.

I hope you all have a safe and restful break.  I look forward to working with you again in 2013.

Guess what I forgot to do?

I forgot to post the paragraph we wrote together.  Sorry.

I will post it this weekend.  I promise.

Enjoy your weekend!  Keep working on those protest poems!  (Remember?  The one about the invisible worker, or silenced voice, or morally reprehensible job).

Theme Statements and Paragraph Writing

We spent the first part of today's class reviewing the final stanza of the poem, "As in the Beginning."  A major focal point of this discussion was the strategies you can use to help yourself make sense of a poem.  Remember to consider line length, stanza breaks, punctuation, poetic devices and word choice (among other things!) as you read.

After we read through the poem together, we worked to develop a theme statement.  We discussed the importance of creating a theme statement which addresses the entirety of the poem: one that is neither too specific nor too broad.  For this poem, we agreed that the following sentence accurately captures the theme:  Many companies believe that financial compensation is sufficient pay back for a workplace injury; however, there is truly no paying back the loss experienced by an individual and his/her family.  We acknowledged that many lines and phrases from this poem would support this theme statement.

To conclude the class, students wrote a paragraph on the theme of the poem, demonstrating their current ability to write a formal, academic paragraph.  The information I get about strengths and areas for further improvement will guide the direction of future lessons.

"As in the Beginning"

After completing a pre-reading activity called, "What's In, What's Out," students were asked to make a prediction about the poem.

We then read the poem together, and students selected three words/phrases/lines that resonated with them, and they "GOSSIP"ed about these lines.  We discussed which lines stood out for us, and why.

We then began to analyze the poem as a class, and Ms. Barsky is sharing strategies for understanding poetry.