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Poetry & Song tool box
Overview
Poetry is a genre of literature with an intense emotional expression with a distinct style and rhythm of verse that can be analyzed by the poetic elements.
Genre includes nursery rhymes, ballads, epics, songs, poems, and lyrics
Elements of Poetry
Poetry has an overall central theme or idea within each poem
- Images - the mental pictures the poet creates through language
- Diction - the selection of specific words
Form - the arrangement of words, lines, verses, rhymes, and other features. - Cadence - A rhythmic change in the inflection of sounds from words being spoken. Sometimes referred to the flow of words.
- Couplet - two lines of verse that rhyme at the end and are thought as one unit
- Meter - A rhythm that continuously repeats a single basic pattern.
- Rhyme - Words that end with similar sounds. Usually at the end of a line of the poem.
- Rhyming - Two lines of a poem together with the same rhythm
- Rhythm - A pattern created with sounds: hard - soft, long - short, bouncy, quiet - loud, weak - strong .
- Stanza - A part of a poem with similar rhythm and rhyme that will usually repeat later in the poem.
- Verse - A line of a poem, or a group of lines within a long poem.
Quality Characterisics
- Imaginative
- Creative
- Descriptive and vivid language that often has an economical or condensed use of words chosen for their sound and meaning
- Meaning is enhanced by recalling memories of related experiences in the reader or listener
- Provokes thought
- Causes an emotional response: laughter, happy, sad …
- Uses figurative language (personification, similies, methaphors...)
- Imagery where the reader/listener creates vivid mental images
- Often has rhythm and rhyme
- Often includes words and phrases that have a pattern made with rhythm and rhyme.
- Story in verse
- Can have physical and grammatical arrangement of words usually enhance the reader's overall experience
Questions to ask to analyze & evaluate the quality of poetry
- Does it have figurative language and imagery?
- Does it create images? (pictures, sounds, smells, tastes, touching sensations)
- Is what the author says or doesn’t say helpful in creating imagery?
- Does it move from the familiar to the unfamiliar or unfamiliar to familiar in a manner that enlightens and/or amazes?
- Is it understandable? (literally, interpretively, and emotionally) Alone or with help?
- Does it appeal to me? To who else would it appeal?
- Does the poem touch people emotionally?
- Are words combined in a mixture that communicates both a literal and suggested meaning.
- Not so precise as to limit the imagination or so suggestive as to not communicate? (denotation and connotation).
- Does it get to the heart of an idea?
- Is it creative with language? Use language and words in interesting ways? (metaphors, similes, personifications).
- Are words used in a highly powerful manner? Is there a lot of zap with few words?
- Is it a language of simplicity?
- Does it sing to you? [sounds (alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia), verse, rhythm, patterns, beat (words, phrases), rhyme (end of line, inline, and/or link rhyme)
- Does it include ideas that people can use?
Children like to write poetry because they
- feel there are no limitations
- can be creative without taking risks
- don't need to worry about conventions (punctuation, complete sentences).
Children might not like to write poetry because they
- don't like to struggle with word choices
- don't like the struggle with a desire to be original
- don't want to risk creating something someone might not like
- don't have strategies to help be creative
- struggle with words (spelling, vocabulary, small repetooire of words)
- desire to have it rhyme, have rhythm,and/or a melody
Instructional ideas
A fairly easy instructional strategy to use with a poem is to read a poem and ask students to answer four questions, individually, in a group, or as a class:
- What do you think the poet was trying to share by writing the poem?
- What emotions are felt when the poem is read?
- What are three key words, phrases, or ideas in the poem. Be ready to explain why you believe your choices are key.
- Use your three words, phrases, or ideas to write a summary about the poem.
- Checklist to evaluate good poems
- Limirick introductory sequence
- Walk Two Moons and activity for Longfellows poem
- Composers
- Poem List
- Poets
Poem Samples
- Snowy Evening Poet: Robert Frost
- The Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's Feast Poet: William Roscoe (1807)
- Crocodile, Poet: unknown
- Samples from my poem collection 26 assorted poems.
- Valentines day assorted poems
- Three Little Pigs Read Aloud or Sing Along or Chant Along. Mother Goose related
- Song lyrics: Breakaway, Artist: Kelly Clarkson
Choral reading samples
Early writing in America 900 BCE
Maybe first American poem... It is thought to be a poem as the images repeat in a pattern similar to the pattern of Mesoamerican poetic couplets. Scientific American July 2015
