The Poetry Pack
Help your children to read and write poetry with this pack of teaching, activity and display resources!
Objective: Students will bring in photographs from their personal lives and write a poem about it, or write about a photograph they wish they had, and why.
Materials: Photographs supplied by students and teacher, Writing supplies, Poem on overhead transparency (Encarta)
Visual Resources: Photographs, Poems
Procedure:
I have a photograph of my mother
standing on a hill, San Francisco
lying beneath her. She is facing
the sun. Her white suit coat is open
and flaps in the wind, filling
the space between her raised arms
and her body like the wings of an angel.
Her hair is shimmering, one blond hunk
of it flying skyward. Her thin hand is
a shadowed awning above her eyes
and she stands straight: a tall
golden stalk in a growing field.
Today she called from Florida
voice slurred, spilling commands
that I tell her about my separation,
my job, my life. Threatening, between
bouts of coughing, to fly here in
just two hours. And I could see her,
hunched over the phone, dried up and
shrinking like a root torn from the earth
and long forgotten. And when I said "No"
and then "Good bye," I knew that I would look
for her photograph to remind me to be gentle
to this person who once stood on the edge of life
and soared ahead faithfully to meet it.
Assessment: Based on formally assessing "voice" in poetic writing.
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