Elm Tree Poetry 2017: Week 2 — Day 2

Dear Elm Tree fams, 

Today we had a new friend join us for our second session: Maddie! All of the our poets were just as thrilled to have her join us as we were. The day began with the kiddos playing independently in the forested area behind our drop-off location. To our surprise, the kiddos built a bug hotel!

 

 

We then paired the kiddos up with their travel and poetry buddy for the day & were off to Mount Prospect Park:

Ajay & Oona

Maddie & Enid

Audrey & Annabel

Lyla & Gayatri

Maren & Jacie 

As soon as we settled on a spot, we asked the kids to drop their bags and line up to play RED ROVER! We formed two teams and had the kiddos come up with team names: Courtana vs. Canadian Bunny. Just in case you have forgotten this electric game, the teams each link hands and call out "Red rover, red rover send (Romy) right over!", at which point the person called has to run full-force and try to break the chain of arms on the opposing side. If they break through, they go back to their team; if they can't, they must join the opposing team. The kids were so taken by the game, and so good at it, that there was no natural end point, so we played countless rounds—they didn't want to stop! We will definitely play this game again throughout the week. 

We took a break to get down on some snacks, and Romy made good on a promise to tell the kiddos a story about her childhood turtle, Sleepy-Grumpy. Ask your kids to recount the story! After snack time, we had the kids gather around the tapestry with their notebooks in hand, and read them Pulitzer Prize winner Gwendolyn Brooks' "Bronzeville: Boys and Girls", a collection of poems that celebrate "the joy, beauty, imagination, and freedom of childhood." The poems serve as profiles of the adults and children in the neighborhood of Bronzeville, and we used this as a vehicle to discuss our day's theme: a fusion of journalism and poetry called "verse journalism." 

 

Brooks was one of the early pioneers of the form, articulating the role of the poet as "a fly on the wall...poet as all-seeing eye." She has the distinction of being the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize, and has been praised by the likes of Langston Hughes, who said, “the people and poems in Gwendolyn Brooks’ book are alive, reaching, and very much of today.” As a result, we wanted to frame our study of verse journalism within her work, as she both chronicles and celebrates the lived realities of her neighbors, working with journalistic clarity to craft lyrical stories. 

We read two poems—"Mexie and Bridie" and "Andre"—each twice, and closely examined the ways they worked as both poetry and journalism: the retelling and reporting of a story. We emphasized the importance of a single word in a poem and had the kids close their eyes to select words that popped out at them. We talked about the stories within the lines of the poems in an effort to lead them towards creating their own poetic profiles. This lead to a discussion about the pillars of journalism, and what makes for good reporting, which we framed as a type of factual storytelling. Brooks was writing poems about her neighbors in Bronzeville, and we asked the kids to think about that act as sprouting from the intention behind reporting: to tell the stories of other people, especially those who can't tell their own. We asked: "who might not be able to tell their own stories, and why?" 

The kiddos were quick to answer. Oona said that reporters might be telling the stories of people who have passed away. Annabel shouted that reports might have to report on behalf of people whose voices are marginalized, like black people and women. And it was Audrey who said that "the government might be stopping people from telling their stories," a comment which really froze Romy and Rod in place. Elm Tree kids are always managing to find new ways to impress us, but it was really humbling to have Audrey be able to cut through an extraneous amount of context-building by quickly establishing a historical truth.

 

 

This lead to our day's writing exercise, which we approached in parts: we had the kids pair up with their poetry buddies and sit face-to-face as we prompted them with a series of questions that they were to treat as a formal interview. The questions were:

1. What was a time that you laughed the hardest?

2. What was a time that you were the most scared?

3. If you could organize a protest, what would you choose to protest?

We taught the kids to listen carefully, to ask the right follow-up questions, and to take notes on keywords and details. We also told them to examine their subjects, to study their gestures and facial expressions, and to jot down descriptive notes about what they were seeing as their partner answered the questions. 

 

 

Once they had completed the interview portion of our verse journalism process, we broke for lunch and had the kids get some much needed time to run around and play.

After lunch, they sat back down in their pairs and dove into the second portion of our project, which was establishing a form that fused the structure of an article with the form of a poem. Romy had them begin their poem with a line or two that described the details of their subject: the curve of an eyebrow, the curl of a lip, the placement of a hand as they’re speaking. Rod then had the kids turn two of the three interview answers into a quote that they could use as lines in their poem. Rod and Romy explained both what a quote and quotation mark was, as the children were not familiar with these terms. Romy then explained the final part of the project: ending with a rhetorical question that either built on the theme of the poem, or took off in another direction, as many poems do.

 

We had originally planned to have the kids draw an accompanying art piece, but Audrey asked whether we were going to paint portraits of their partners. This was a welcome idea, and a great example of what Elm Tree is about: giving kids the agency to influence a lesson and inform their own learning process. In this case, that resulted in a more intimate piece of art than what we had originally planned.

Check out their work below!

 

by Lyla

 

by Annabel

 
by Jacie

 

by Ajay

 

by Audrey

by Gayatri

 

by Oona  

 

by Enid 

 

by Maddie

  

by Maren 

This poetry project was extremely challenging, but the kiddos took it on with gusto. We tailored this experience based on our combined love of (accurate!) journalism and lyric. Note that you will find the work to be very political, but not much by our own prompting. Aside from the protest question, which we hadn’t even prompted yet, your children lead the discussion towards our current political climate rather naturally. As a result, while we agree with quite literally everything they wrote about 45, it was the result of strictly their own thoughts.

We ended the day by giving the kids some time to run amuck in the sprinklers and atop the jungle gyms of Mount Prospect Park, watching as the sun shined on our bright writers.

 

 

 

  

This blog is real news!

Romy & Rod