I'm a Poet, You're a Poet, We're All Poets!

As I began composing my final scheduled blog post of the semester, I decided that I wanted to primarily discuss and share my own pieces of writing. I utilized the information I gathered from my course readings and drew inspiration from the mentor texts I explored this week when creating the poems I will be sharing with you. Since I have discussed other topics surrounding poetry and writing in general in my previous posts, I wanted to focus on how these mentor texts supported me as a writer and how I can transfer what I learned into my future writing instruction.

Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children’s Literature, K-6 has been an incredible resource for me this year, teaching me to be more comfortable when experimenting with writing by providing me with the necessary support. A plethora of different writing strategies are discussed throughout each chapter, and in the “Your Turn” section there are step by step lessons written out that you can implement with students or use to practice your own writing. These strategies being shared in this way allowed me to grow tremendously as a writer because I was provided with a mentor text to reference, a completed writing sample of the strategy, and an explanation of the strategy to support me as I created my own piece. I realized that when new writing strategies were introduced to me in this way, I felt much less intimidated and actually looked forward to trying it out myself. I appreciate this new relationship I have formed with writing and believe if I model my writing instruction after what is demonstrated in this text that I will not only be able to better support my students as growing writers, but also create an environment where students learn to love writing.

Since I am still learning to appreciate my work as a poet and come up with my own ideas, I like to use examples from mentor texts or scaffolds to guide my writing. Once I have had the opportunity to practice a specific type of writing with support I feel much more confident when trying it on my own, and I think students would benefit from receiving writing instruction in this way. My most recent post heavily discussed the benefits of scaffolding so I do not want to go too into depth, but I will discuss one thing in this post. I think that allowing students to heavily rely on a mentor text or a writing example is beneficial when they begin practicing a new writing strategy. Not only will they be receiving the necessary level of support but they will also begin to understand the strategy, making them more likely to apply it in the future. I think it would be interesting to have students leave two pages available, side by side in their notebooks for each writing experience. One page would have their writing sample that was heavily influenced by the mentor text and the other would be a writing sample where the student took what they learned to create a piece of their own. This would allow your students to learn the benefits of revising their writing or revisiting writing strategies, teach them how to write independently as you gradually reduce the level of support, and show them how they are constantly growing as writers by placing two of their pieces side by side. This would be incredibly beneficial for striving writers, but it could also be helpful for any writer when practicing something new.

This week I focused on chapter seven in Mentor Texts, which discusses poetry writing. I love the way this text addresses poetry, using words and explanations that make it seem much more accessible to the average writer. When reading the chapter there were a few ideas that stuck out to me, so I decided to try them out. As I share the pieces I created I will discuss how the text supported and inspired me. When implementing these forms of writing into my classroom instruction I would use a similar format as described above, utilize mentor texts that clearly apply the specific strategy, and provide my writing to serve as an example. Since this would remain true for each of the different pieces of writing I will be discussing, I will not be going into detail on how I would implement each of these strategies in the classroom as that would become quite repetitive.

I also explored Thanku: Poems of Gratitude by Miranda Paul this week, and chose to utilize it as a mentor text for my first writing example; found poetry. Personally, I had never written a found poem, but the way it was discussed in Mentor Texts made it sound doable. The text says that a good place to start is with a short text and that all you have to is write down the phrases that sound poetic while reading. It is also stated that you can insert some of your own ideas, but the majority of the poem should come directly from the selected text. I selected one of my favorite poems from Thanku and did just that, here's what I came up with:

As I was creating this found poem I incorporated some of my own ideas, utilized the words that were already present in the text, and a combination of the two. You can clearly see evidence of the mentor poem, "Dear Sky," in my final piece, but will also notice where I included my own words or inserted words in order to create a cohesive poem.

Next I tried "Exploring Color Through the Senses" which was also described in Mentor Text. I used the list provided in the text (looks like, sounds like, smells like, tastes like, feels like) as a reference when creating my own poem. I used "Falling Leaves" from Thanku for inspiration, choosing the color orange as my focus. Although that's the one color not directly mentioned in the poem, the illustrations on the page and the words used to describe autumn provided me with a lot to reference when choosing my words. This shows how you can use a wide variety of poems to serve as a source of inspiration, it just depends how they speak to you!

Another form of poetry I experimented with this week is sound poetry. I used "Song" by Amy VanDerwater as inspiration and collected sounds while sitting outside on a sunny spring day. I followed the format of VanDerwater's poem, but used words that described spring since that was my setting.

One of the benefits of this type of poetry, found poetry, and poetry related to colors and the senses is that they are all relatable and easy for anyone to create. It's easy to sit and record what you hear, then modifying it a bit to make it sound more poetic. It's easy to pick out your favorite words from a text, then rearranging them in a way that sounds good to you. It's also easy to write about what a color reminds you of, then connecting what you came up with to accurately describe each of the senses. All of this is easy IF you are provided with the necessary support and plenty of opportunities to practice, which can be easy especially when using reliable mentor texts.