Comments on: Love Love That Dog

By: Cris

Cris — Thu, 28 Jun 2012 15:06:15 +0000

Thanks for your thoughtful post, Cogdog, to Judy and Jabiz who are obviously great teachers of poetry, and to you for your “long” reflective post, Michael.

I think providing prompts is helpful. I do it even at the the graduate level. Because I think you’re right that not everyone takes naturally to reflection. I think most educators believe reflection is a learned way of thinking and I’d add that it’s also connected to personality types.

I’m looking for a source that shares much of the latest thinking about reflection. Brookfield (1988) which suggests reflecting from multiple perspectives is a classic. Here’s a helpful overview of thinking about teaching for reflection — http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/development/reflection.html

btw I share Creech’s book (and follow-up Hate that Cat) with everyone interested in learning to teach poetry.

By: Michael Branson Smith

Michael Branson Smith — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 17:28:04 +0000

I was tricked into the Herculean chore of doing the layout of 50 pages for PS 154′s poetry journal (my son’s school). Probably 300+ poems that needed typography work and there was artwork added as well. But when Wyatt (6) came home with his copy of the journal, he went running to my wife saying, “look at this, look at this, it’s my poem in a journal.”

My FEt Are A SEP (My Feet Are Asleep)

MY FOOt is
A SEP (asleep)
I EM (I’m)
GUN tRiY (going to try)
to WK (to wake)
MY FOOT UP
I Will PUS (push)
it AND
HMR (hammer) it AND it HAS
WAt (woke) UP YAY!

So cool watching his learning, and getting him to describe why he wrote it was pretty awesome too.

Great post, and I believe the narration sadly doesn’t always come naturally for many. Would be interesting to play with ways to foster the development of that process. Possibly with some narration prompts to go with assignments? A “wild card narration prompt” could be interesting and bet people could seed ideas for narration prompts. Students could cycle through a generator until one sticks to the digital assignment idea they’ve been working on. I don’t know, does that make any sense?

Sorry for the long comment!

By: Jabiz Raisdana

Jabiz Raisdana — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 13:15:05 +0000

I’ve taught this book for two years as intro to our poetry unit. It is nice and sweet. Kids really like it.

By: Judy Griffith

Judy Griffith — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 03:12:37 +0000

Love your views on the story! I will look for that one. It makes me think about how I encourage my first graders to use their creativity to tell a story! Poetry can be so much fun and doesn’t have to fit a rhyming pattern! :)