Powerful Poetry Shines at Our Annual Poetry Night
Posted by Ariel WarshawOn the evening of February 19th, our fifth grade poets celebrated their remarkable work at our annual Poetry Night. This special event, set at the Barnes & Noble in Westport, marked the culmination of a 5 week unit that allowed us to examine and craft numerous forms of poetry. Throughout this unit, we continued to explore an essential question:
Why do we write poetry? Is it to entertain? To reflect? To educate? To meditate? To empower?
Our fifth graders played with rhythm and humor in their limericks, imagery and word choice in their haikus and acrostics, and the parts of speech in their cinquains and diamantes. After analyzing a compilation of Dr. Martin Luther King’s speeches, these writers identified powerful and inspiring terminology and turned those into passionate found poems. We explored the power of self-reflection, reading Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” along with a number of other exemplary autobiographical poems. Our poets looked within to consider what makes them unique, special, and perfectly imperfect, and then used figurative language to illustrate their complexity. Those “I Am” poems will serve as artist statements for their self portraits that grace our halls. We also considered how poetry can serve as a call to action. These students’ powerful protest poems will inform the arpilleras they are creating in Visual Arts, inspired by the bold and empowered female poets and artists of Pinochet’s Chile. Finally, we experimented with rhyme, imitation, and whimsy by crafting playful poems inspired by Jack Prelutsky’s, “Bleezer’s Ice Cream.” Get ready to be WOWed by their rhyming skills! In total, during our Poetry unit these writers penned 363 original poems.
While many of the poems these students crafted allowed them to simply play around with rhyme and humor, others required a great deal of tenacity and introspection. This special collection of work should warm your souls, stir emotions, and inspire your minds – they certainly made for a moving and memorable evening!
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