Poetry-Friendly Classroom, Clip #8

If you read a poem to the children and start looking at it in class, see if you can restrict yourself to only asking the children questions that you, the teacher, don't know answers to.

So, instead of asking, 'count the adjectives', or 'what kind of poem is this?' and the like, how about asking 'does this poem remind you of anything you've ever read before?' (or anything you've ever seen on TV or on a film). Does anything in the poem remind you of anything that's ever happened to you? What kinds of things going on are similar to things you’ve read before or similar to things that have happened to you and what kinds of things are different?

As with the post-its round the poem you’ve put up on the wall, you can say: what kinds of questions would you like to ask of anyone or anything in the poem and/or of the poet? Is there anyone in the room who would like to have a go at answering these? (It might help to act out an interview here as if, say, you were interviewing Humpty Dumpty about how he felt about no one being able to put him together.)

If we can’t come up with answers ourselves, is there anywhere we could go to find answers? Books? Internet? Anywhere we could find out more about the author or the time and place that author lived through? Are there any patterns or shapes in the poem that anyone wants to talk about? Do you like these? Or not?

You could ask if anyone can see 'Secret Strings'.
A secret string, is anything that links one word or phrase to any other. As we know, the most common of these is rhyme, but there's also rhythm.

There’s also the length of a sentence or length of line that might get repeated. The repetition is the secret string. Or you get repetitions of a sound, a phrase, an image, and any kind of pattern. Quite often, the more you look, the more you find. Make it clear that you haven’t seen the secret strings that they’ve seen.