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Understanding poetry
(by Kathryn A. Burger - July 22, 2008)
How likely is it that third- and fourth-graders would enjoy learning about and writing poetry? What about reading their original work at a school assembly?
If you were to ask the third- and fourth-graders at Washington Elementary School, the answer would be, very likely.
This spring, under the guidance of two professional poets, both general education and special education students in these grades – more than 100 students – were the beneficiaries of a comprehensive program focusing on poetry – writing it and performing it – through a grant obtained by the school’s speech-reading specialists Marilena Damiani and Marsha Fleischner.
The school is piloting an Inclusion program in which children with special education needs or disabilities are being integrated into general education classrooms with peers of regular or mixed learning disabilities. The teachers, who work with the entire student body at the school, said, “As educators, our aim is to meet the unique, diverse needs of each individual learner by stimulating creative, multi-sensory experiences and higher order thinking to help children make connections to the text provided.”
This year, they applied for and were awarded a grant funded by the New Jersey Writers Project and Playwrights Theatre of New Jersey, in partnership with the New Jersey Council on the Arts, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.
The grant consisted of a four-day residency program. Professional poets Penny Harter and William Higginson visited the school and spent each day meeting separately with third and fourth grade classes and their teachers. They shared their professional writings, provided explanations and examples of poetry techniques, stimulated creative writing via pictures, presented Haiku, and worked with the students to create one or two special pieces which the students edited, in addition to having the students each write their own individual poems.
The visiting artists also conducted a workshop for teachers in which they provided strategies for teaching imagery to students. As part of the workshop, teachers wrote poems of their own.
The culminating activity for the program was the school’s own poetry festival, “The Poetry in Me.” In attendance were students, family members, teachers and guests, as well as Dr. Rachelle Parker, principal at Washington School and Geoffrey W. Zoeller, Jr., the district superintendent. The student presented their best work at the festival. The poems were then collected and compiled in special anthology.
Damiani and Fleischner, as well as grade three teachers Lorraine Parsekian, Arline Rosenberg and Kathy Sudok and grade four teachers Melinda DeVreis, Helen Ginsburg, Tricia McVeigh and Susan Miller all agree that the benefits of the poetry program were evident in the students’ work presented at the festival.
After participating in the program, a third grade class took a field trip to the McFaul Environmental Center in Wyckoff. Their teacher saw an opportunity to incorporate the strategies she and the students had learned and encouraged them to use their new skills when composing creative poems based on their experiences at the center. The poems covered many wildlife topics and the students utilized a variety of poetry forms including Haiku, riddles, alliteration and free verse.
The grant program coincided with Damiani and Fleischner’s advocacy for performance as a learning medium. “We want to instill a love of the arts in our students,” they said.
Kathryn A. Burger's e-mail address is burger@northjersey.com.
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