After yesterday's big performances, the students come in today not knowing quite what to expect. I tell them that today's lesson is the culmination of all of our lessons on the book Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices. Today, students are going to get to analyze a poem for word choice and structure all by themselves. (There was not the cheering that I thought there might be for this!! But, oh well!!)
I show the students the document they will use to analyze any poem from the book they choose. I have a student hand out the books while I settle in at the ELMO and turn to "Whirligig Beetles".
Once all the students have their books open to "Whirligig Beetles", I read the document questions and we work through them together. This poem will not be one they can choose from when completing their own analysis, but I wanted to model some thinking with the students and remind them of all the lessons we've learned. This takes a while, but when we're done, I'm pretty sure they get it.
I hand out their documents and instruct them to choose any poem they wish and complete the analysis. I give students the entire time to work.
Near the end of class, I gather the students back together as a group and collect the papers. I ask them for a "Glow and a Grow" for this unit. I want to know what they liked and didn't like. In our discussion, I heard a lot of things that I can file away for next year. Most kiddos liked the poetry reading and did NOT like the final summative assessment that we did in this lesson. (Why am I not surprised!!)