It's mid-April and I just remembered that it's National Poetry Month.
Back in my teaching days, April was nearing the end of the school year and the students' minds were looking forward to their carefree summer rather than classroom instruction. To keep our 8th graders focused on curriculum, my co-Language Arts partner and I put together a poetry unit that focused on the next phase of their academic journey - high school. Poetry is a great way to promote creative thinking. It's subjective, unique to that person, and it gives students the opportunity to think outside the box. It's beneficial to reluctant readers and writers as the shorter form of writing may be more accessible to them. Poetry also allows students to see language in a new way. So many of their poems were about the uncertainty of going to high school. They were the "big kids" of middle school and in September they were starting their school year as the newbies in a new school of 2600 students.
The solar eclipse was one week ago today and if I were still teaching, it would be a safe bet that there would be a poetry unit on this celestial event. I came across this poem while reading about the eclipse in other states. Coincidentally, as in the poem, the eclipse in Ohio started about noon, too.
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🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙 🌙Seeing the Eclipse in Maine
What a lovely little poem. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteA failure in my education, I know little about poetry. I do have a volume of the collected works of Edgar A Guest, he would read his works on the radio when I was growing up. My mother picked him up at the airport once for a speaking engagement. I am not sure I "would know a poem if I saw one" as Stanley Fish once wrote. I had an email from him once, about the plural of computer mouse - a friend of ours knew him.
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