Sparkchasers Episode 32 | Show Notes
April is National Poetry Month and if you’re looking for fresh ideas for exploring poetry in your classroom, this episode is for you. We’re sharing 6 ways to teach poetry through arts integration.
Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.”
How can we help students integrate both? Through arts integration! Here’s 6 arts integration strategies for teaching poetry:
Cooperative Poetry
Here’s how cooperative poetry works:
- Poems are written by combining individual student’s responses to a selected painting, sculpture, photograph, portrait, image or artifact with their classmates’ responses.
- Each student, in a group of 4-8 students, reacts to an art piece by independently writing one line of poetry on a sentence strip.
- Then all of the group’s strips are laid out on a table.
- Cooperatively, the group decides how to order the strips to create the most pleasing poem.
Poems for Two Voices
This is a great strategy for looking at point of view or character analysis. In this strategy, students:
- Look at a piece of art that has at least two characters or two points of view. Use Artful Thinking routines to spark discussion.
- Introduce examples of a two-voice poem and discuss how this type of poem could be used tell a story.
- Brainstorm exchanges that might occur between two parties in the painting or two points of view inspired by the art. Students can record these on a three-column organizer: the outer columns are used for lines for each different voice and the middle column for what the lines they might say together.
- Students work in small groups or pairs to write and perform the poems.
Additional Strategies Discussed in this Episode
You can also use these activities to deepen poetry exploration and creation:
- Sensory Poems
- List Poems
- Video-Based Poetry
- Found Poetry
Further directions and explanations for each of these strategies can be found in today’s show notes below.
Show Notes
- Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist Book
- Cooperative Poetry Post
- Poetry, Art, and Writing Examples
- Art Poetry Puppet Videos
- Library of Congress Poetry Guide
- How to Use Found Poetry in the Classroom
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About the podcast
The Art Works for Teachers Podcast helps teachers crack the code of creativity and use it as a hidden advantage in the classroom. Each week, we’ll use “creative clues” from authors, artists, and teachers to unlock the power of the arts and where it can take us in education today.
