Poem Reflections

Reflections on “Desirable Literacies”
The Literacies and Language of Poetry and Rhyme

I particularly like the ideas about cultivating nursery rhymes and involving them in the curriculum. I thought the table of ideas (figure 3.2.) sounded boring but the activities that come later for poetry are really good. I think phonics are great but just chanting a poem or a nursery rhyme would get boring and also I think the phonemes should be presented with the graphemes so I like ideas like the word collage where a collage of pictures and words is assembled.

Reflections on “The Literate Classroom”
“Hey, Poetry”

This seemed less practical then the first handout but dealt with the same topic of how to make poetry exciting and bring the words off of the page. The teacher and his positive attitude was the key. He brought in poems that he liked and that he thought the children would like and taught the children unconventional ideas e.g. that it was ok not to understand the poem or not to understand why you like the sounds of the poem. The teacher based his choices on how much enjoyment the children would get from the poems not how they could analyse them and he explained concepts in simplistic terms as he felt natural as they went through the poem, there was no rigidity of lesson structure. For example the lesson about the strawberry poems was not structured around a learning objective of similes and metaphors the teacher explained metaphors and similes as arose naturally in the learning.
I like this extract because it was inspiring. The teacher had high expectations of what the children could do with poetry and the children rose to them. The teacher did not shy away from adult poems (he mentions L.Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade”) which has adult themes about the war and the bureaucracy but the children got a lot from it even if they did not understand it all.
I was particularly impressed with the strawberry poem; children have wonderful ideas and reflections on their senses that adults do not have. Children have not become over familiar with rules of structure whereas adults have, for example the EAL child that puts a question at the end of the poem because he has perhaps unfamiliar with the structure of a question followed by the answer, but it makes his poem is more expressive and unconfined.