We Have Our Poets' Notes...
What's Next??
Turning Our Observational Notes Into Poems...
We have been busy writing notes about our treasures, looking for poets' notes and adding more details to our notes. It is now time for us to begin making "music" out of our notes so that they begin to sound more like a poem than a story.
We talked about the poem Aquarium, by Valerie Worth, taken from Lucy Calkin's Powerful Thoughts in Tiny Packages. This helped us see the difference between a poem without line breaks and music vs. a poem with line breaks and music. Ask us to read it! See if you can hear the difference!
Without line breaks and music: Goldfish flash gold and silver scales; they flick and slip away under green weed- But round brown snails stick to the glass and stay.
With line breaks and music:
Goldfish
Flash
Gold and silver scales;
They flick and slip away
Under green weed--
But round brown snails
Stick
To the glass
And stay. -- Valerie Worth
We learned that poets choose their words carefully and decide where to place their words in their poems in order to create a poem that has a poetic sound. When we read the above poem with feeling and music we decided to read the beginning quick like we see a goldfish and then slow down at the end with the slowwwwww snail. This is one way the poet intended for us to read the poem with feeling in our voices.
Pictured Above: Addy and Julia work together to make music out of their observation notes.
Using notecards to write our poems
Griffin has lots of poet's notes! He wrote each word from his observations on notecards and is working on sorting his words to make them sound more musical, like a poem. Putting our words onto note cards helps us see our poem in a more concrete way so we can play around with our words and decide which words are most important to create our poems.
This requires a lot of work but Griffin looks up to the challange!
Recording our music into our notebooks
Haley has written her observational notes about the shell onto her note cards and is working on the next step-Recording our musical lines into our poetry notebooks to prepare for our final drafts!.