Stein,+Erica

Ricki Stein - Lesson plan –From Prose to Poetry

Students will write prose, turn it into poetry and post it on a blog, where they will offer each other feedback. Students will also experiment with other poetry formats during the course of the week. Prose to Poetry: Some students struggle to write poetry. This may be especially true for some boys, which I learned during the Jan. 30 Penn State-Lehigh Valley Writing Project Best Practices Conference. Keynote Speaker Ralph Fletcher talked about //Boy Writers//, and suggested allowing boys to be satirical and irreverent in their writing to display subversive humor. Blogging student work: I will show students Lisa Russell’s post about blogging memes. [] I will explain to them that after my meme – frustration – they will be able to take turns coming up with the memes for our focused topic blogs. We will start this Monday, Feb. 1. By Friday, Feb. 5, students will post their poetry on the blog. They can begin responding to each other’s work over the weekend and continue on Monday, Feb. 8 in class. The work they post can also include other forms of poetry that I introduced and with which they experiment (formatively) during class, Writer’s Workshop time. 1. I will model (Best Practice) on the Smart Board. I will open the Word document containing the prose piece I am writing today, based on my 4-day online learning experience. 2. I will show them how I analyze my work for any places where I see possibilities for repetition, emotional reaction and humor. I will mark these with the Smart Board pen or highlight and mark from my keyboard. 3. I will do SAVE AS and create a new document. 4. I will begin to divide sentences into lines, pushing the sentence fragments into poetry format. 5. When I get pretty many lines, I will go back to add repeating lines, humor and emotional reaction. 6. I will do this for 10 minutes tops, then ask students to get started on their own prose piece. 7. We will brainstorm (for 5 minutes) ideas they can use for possible topics. 8. I will continue to work on my prose-to-poetry document while they write theirs. This is Best Practice – //Write Beside Them// (Penny Kittle, National Writing Project). 9. On Tuesday, mini lesson: “Poetry is powerful thought in tiny packages.” We need to pack our poems with great words and keep out the unnecessary or excess words. Teach how to get rid of excess words. Students continue working on their poetry. 10. On Wednesday, students experiment with another form of poetry, introduced through Louis Armstrong’s “It’s a Wonderful World.” 11. On Thursday, students decide which of the poems they have written, dating back to Jan. 26, they want to submit for their Summative Assessment. They will revise and edit these poems. ** Assessment/Evaluation: ** a. I will conference with students all week long for Formative Assessment. If they have questions for me, I can answer them before they finalize their work. I can also offer suggestions, which they have the option to consider or reject. They will also peer conference throughout the week. b. The poems will be scored with our school district’s Standards Based Grading 1-4 format (beginning, developing, proficient, advanced) according to the Write Traits: Ideas and Content; Organization; Voice; Word Choice; Sentence Fluency; Conventions. c. On Friday, I will demonstrate for students how create their own blogs or add their work to my blog. Once it is there, I will demonstrate how to reply with comment to each other’s work. They can offer feedback according to the Write Traits. Over the weekend, I will reply to their work, according to the Write Traits and finalize their grades based on a combination of student and teacher analysis.
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