Poetry

                                Limerick

There once was a guy name Danny
Who lived uptown with his granny                                                     
He had a big waist 
And such good taste 
That he married the pretty girl name Annie.

                                Cinquain

                          Beach 

                    Quiet      Calm 

   Bathing        Relaxing        Playing 

                 It's the place to be

                           Fun 


How did you feel after reading the two pieces above?  Would you be interested in writing if this was what teachers expected from you as a writer?  
Now that you have considered your feelings, take a second to imagine how a child would feel about writing if they are introduced to it using these pieces.  Unfortunately, the perception that most students have of writing is that it is a long and mundane process.  They often see it as something that is frustrating, as teachers are always 'nagging' about their Vocabulary, Grammar, Spelling, Phonics and other conventions of writing.  Such occurrences perpetuates the negative views of writing, as early as the infant grades.  However, every teacher holds the cure to this issue, in the form of poetry.  

Poetry is literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas are given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.  In this definition, we can see that poetry not only encompasses literary work, but it also emphasizes the need for freedom of expression and ideas.  This component of writing is often lost when teachers engage students in writing instruction as they usually determine students' topics, sequence and styles of writing.  With poetry, the students can divulge their feelings and ideas in the absence of strict conventions and a teacher's expectations.  This will allow students to feel the need to put their ideas on paper as poetry accepts everything that they have to say.  Upon the completion of writing their poems, teachers should then give students the opportunities to entertain their peers by reciting, publishing and performing their work.  

Not only can poetry be used as an intriguing way to develop students' love for writing, but it can also be used to teach students the different conventions of writing, while their remain entertain and interested.  In poems like the haiku and the cinquain, teachers can teach students about syllables and the continuous tense of verbs, respectively.  Furthermore, areas like rhyming, word families and adjectives can also be taught using poetry.  This will develop a sense of interest and motivation for students to learn such aspects of writing, as it is done in context, rather than in isolation. 

When students have developed the love and willingness to put pen to paper through poetry, we can then introduce students to other forms of expression through writing.  These will take the form of the different genres of writing: descriptive writing, narrative writing, exposition and argumentative writing.  

One may argue that every genre of writing allows students to be expressive and therefore question the need for poetry.  While every genre indeed caters to expression, poetry provides the most welcoming, interesting, expressive and entertaining platform for writing, and our students love to entertain and be entertained.  This was made clear to us as the lecturer did an outstanding job at allowing us to see the importance of poetry through various interesting activities.  For this reason, our suggestion to every teacher, is to incorporate poetry into your writing classroom, and contemplate introducing writing through this genre.  



Written by: Shaquille Aldonza, Jina Jonas, Leah Giman-Satoute 

Planning for Descriptive Writing Instruction

As stated by Robert John Meehan, well prepared and engaging teacher is a catalyst and spark that creates the desire to learn in our students.  To be a well prepared and engaging teacher, we must appreciate and engage in through lesson planning to create a roadmap for students and ourselves.  For this reason, our lecturer veered away from teaching writing, to engaging us in formulating lesson plans for writing instruction.  Considering the fact that every genre of writing requires variations in the planning process, we started by focusing on one planning for descriptive writing.  

Similarly to the writing lessons, the lecturer began the lesson planning instruction by involving us in planning a lesson, collectively.  The first course of action during this phase was to identify our topic and expectations for students.  This allowed us to start visualizing the destination that we want to take our students to, thus contemplating the objectives and activities that they need to achieve to arrive at that point.  Despite the fact that we have been consistently writing lesson plans for instruction in various subject areas, planning for this descriptive lesson was slightly different from the what are accustomed to.  While some persons felt that we were steering away from the topic by seemingly focusing on adjectives during the lesson, others believed that the transitioning from cognitive to psychomotor objectives was a bit slow.  

As we continued with the planning of this descriptive lesson, the lecturer gradually released responsibility to us by allowing different groups to formulate appropriate introductions for the lesson, based on the intentions and objectives which were initially identified.  After sharing ideas and deciding on a few suitable introductions, the groups came together as a class to share their work, which was constructively criticized by other individuals.  

This entire activity proved to be quite interesting and meaningful to us because it cleared a misconception for us and provided insight on how to plan writing instruction through the writing process, albeit for one genre of writing.  Furthermore, it also gave us the opportunity to gather various objectives, activities and introductions which can be used to teach this one genre of writing, thus facilitating differentiation in the writing classroom. 

Moving foward, we suggest that the lecturer continues to involve us in the lesson planning process in the different genres of writing.  Not only will this result in us becoming better lesson planners, but it will also equip us with a multitude of ideas to build a bank of interesting activites to utilize on teaching practice and throughout our teaching careers in the writing classroom. 

In the link below, you can find information pertaining to descriptive writing.  This includes the purpose, reasons for teaching it, how to teach it and two videos which identify activities to use when teaching this genre of writing.  We encourage you to take some time to peruse through the contents of the link to hopefully learn something new.  

Enjoy! 

https://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/descriptive_writing