April 11-15

Monday: Today we looked at how white space affects a poem’s rhythm, flow, and meaning by reading the poem “Foul Shot” in paragraph format and how it was originally written.  The students did a short assessment on the poem, which we corrected together in class.  For the second half, the students finished up poetry stations.  There should be 6 sheets of paper that they filled out along with writing on the world’s longest poem (Jabberwocky poem, annotations on Jabberwocky, stream of consciousness poem, figurative language colored paper poem, found poetry, smart station vocab).  This is the last day we will work on stations in class.  Expect the poetry exam on Friday of this week.

Homework: All poetry stations finished and turned in

Tuesday: We talked about parallelism in Hebrew poetry.  We talked through synthetic, antithetical, climactic, and synonymous parallelism and examined how those forms of poetry are used in scripture.  The students completed a worksheet to practice.  These concepts will show up on the study guide for the poetry exam tomorrow.  It’s important to recognize these literary features as we study scripture and appreciate the psalms and other poetry.

Wednesday: The students wrote thank you notes to their science fair judges.  We also worked on study guides for the poetry unit.  Here is a brief explanation of the impact of white space.  You can read it for a simple review before the exam if that’s a concept you struggle with. One of the more difficult concepts is voice.  This is a long lesson plan, but it would be beneficial to look over if you struggle with voice in poetry.  I like their explanation of voice, that it’s “your personality and resonance flowing in print.”

Homework: Poetry exam on Friday