Wordplaygrounds: Reading, Writing, and Performing Poetry in the English Classroom / Edition 1

by John S. O'Connor

Overview

O'Connor offers new approaches to teaching poetry in middle and high school with more than 25 writing activities that can constitute an entire course or work as individual lessons.

John S. O’Connor offers exciting new approaches to teaching poetry in middle school and high school classrooms with more than 25 high-interest activities designed to sharpen students’ writing and self-understanding and heighten their awareness of the world around them. In the process, he demystifies poetry for teachers and students by using students’ own life experiences as the basis for all student writing. The activities can constitute an entire course in poetry writing or work as individual lessons, depending on the teacher’s classroom goals. Early lessons start out with simple lists and wordplay; later lessons involve more complicated forms and subjects. Throughout the book, however, the emphasis is on fun and making sure that every student succeeds. In all, O’Connor provides an impressive number of poetry models—more than 30 professional models and more than 80 models from students in his own classroom. Students will also learn how to dramatize poems, creating special effects in performance, both in the classroom and beyond the walls of the school. Wordplaygrounds shows how students can move beyond the traditional boundaries of English curricula, interpreting poetry through a variety of media, including music, art, and dance—without special talent and training in these areas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814158197
Publisher:	National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)
Publication date:	11/03/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	155
Sales rank:	1,046,829
Product dimensions:	7.20(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	xiii
1	Everyday Poets	1
	In My Life	1
	Teaching Poetry	4
	Using Models	5
	The Teacher as Coach	6
	Revision	6
	Author-izing Students	7
	Poetry and Performance	8
2	Preparing the Palette	11
	Word Warm-ups	12
	Word Association Poems	12
	List Poems	13
	Map Poems	16
	Definition Poems	17
3	Same Pond, New Splash: Writing Modern English Haiku	19
	Features of Haiku	20
	Writing Haiku	21
4	Songs of Ourselves	27
	Name Games	27
	I Contain Multitudes	33
5	Presences and Absences	38
	Object Lessons	38
	Odes to Common Things	40
	Loss Poems	44
6	Avenues to the Past	48
	I Remember	48
	Memory Poems	53
	Photograph Poems	55
	Writing Photograph Poems	56
7	Sounds, Speeds, and Sliding Doors	62
	Spound Poems	62
	Speed Poems	68
	Writing Speed Poems	71
	Sliding Doors Poems	74
8	Reading Ourselves away from Ourselves	83
	Responding to Art	83
	Historical Persona Poems	86
	Literary Persona Poems	89
	Dramatizing People in Our Lives	91
	City/Neighborhood Poems	94
9	Writing Lives	98
	Poetry Poems	99
	Revision	103
	Books of Poems	109
10	Performance Tools: Punching, Pausing, Painting	113
	Punching Words	113
	Pausing	115
	Painting Words	118
	Performing Children's Poems	120
	Choral Poems	125
11	Performance: Stage Persona	128
	Class Example: Discovering Persona	129
	Group Performances of First-Person Poems	133
12	Performance: Beyond the Boundaries	139
	Poetry and Music	139
	Performance Art: Poem-Music Collaboration	141
	The Haiku Project	145
	Reading outside the English Classroom	146
	Works Cited	153
	Author	155

Editorial Reviews

"In his delightfully rich book Wordplaygrounds, master teacher John S. O'Connor shows us step by step how to bring the magical, wide, and wild field of poetry into our schools. Dozens of examples show how poetry gives students a voice to express themselves, with suggestions to guide us in every area of poem making, from punctuation and persona to spoken word, music, and choral poems performed in groups. Lush with example poems, Wordplaygrounds will be indispensable to all teachers wishing to find a way to make poetry and the love of language a basic and ongoing part of their students' lives." —Susan Wooldridge, author of poemcrazy: freeing your life with words. "I found Wordplaygrounds to be just the kind of book I am always searching for. Classroom teachers are of course great pragmatists: looking for that great lesson plan, that new suggestion, that 'bag of tricks.' Yet we also need an opportunity to reflect more broadly, to think deeply about plans, intentions, formative assessments, and outcomes. O'Connor hits that balance just right." —Rick Ayers, coeditor of Great Books for High School Kids

From the Publisher