Borderland

For anyone who has done this lesson or another one like it, I’d be interested in a reaction or suggestion because this is the first time I’ve taught a lesson on found poems. It’s not revolutionary or novel, except to me. My interest in teaching poetry this year was prompted by a new understanding of transmediation, and the role that it plays in the construction of meaning. I’m curious to find out what kinds of new meanings my students will make when given the chance to “rewrite” the news.

I took a large box of old newspapers and magazines to school today for the raw material we need. I taught a quick lesson on nouns, adjectives, and verbs before I passed out envelopes to groups of 4 or 5 students. They had an envelope for each of those categories, and then one extra envelope that they could reserve for ??? (unknown) words. it really doesn’t matter if they correctly categorize the words, the envelopes just give them a felt need to think about them analytically. I overheard one littel girl say that the same word could go into different envelopes depending on how it was used. Yup! The ??? (unknown) category was there as a way of keeping the sorting process moving along by relieving the fear of making a wrong decision. Most of the kids tried hard to be correct with which envelope they filed the words into. I showed them what newpaper headlines are, and asked them to cut out as many headline words for each category as they could find.

The groups functioned perfectly. As a cooperative sorting activity for identifying parts of speech, this went great! Over and over I heard, “Is [blank] a noun?” and so on. The room buzzed with hundreds of decisions that were made over the course of about 30 minutes. If I tried this without the promise of making a poem at the end of the process, I don’t think it would have generated as much interest as it did. There won’t be enough words to make many poems when we begin tomorrow, so I expect we’ll have to cut some more before we begin composing.

The next step (after we’re done cutting the words out) will be to arrange them in phrases that are thematically related. I’ll give the kids some colorful construction paper to put the words on. Once they’re glued down, we can scan our found poems and publish them. Maybe we’ll perform them, too.