Subject Spotlight: Lower School Literacy Curriculum’s Fourth Grade Poetry Unit
By Dylan Howlett
6-minute read
August marked the debut of EL Education’s Language Arts curriculum in the Durham Academy Lower School. The research-backed approach to literacy integrates reading, writing, speaking and listening skills through the study of high-quality, diverse texts.
That includes poetry, which served as the foundation for fourth grade’s first unit within the new curriculum: analyzing poems to determine themes, identifying a poet’s inspiration, understanding the mechanics of cadence and rhythm and rhyme. The unit culminated in early December with poetry presentations, during which each fourth grader read aloud an original poem to their classmates — and filled their ears and eyes with the musicality and imagery they had studied closely for almost three months. And a little guidance from a colorful raconteur gave them the confidence they needed to embrace their artistry.
They’re all poets. And they know it.
“You’ve been bit by the poetry bug”
The Mustangs are expectant — in a way that only excited fourth graders can be on an auspicious Thursday morning in October— as their teacher, Lauren Miller, pauses for poetic effect.
“Do you want to go see the ‘Poetry Guy?’” Miller asks. “He’s ready for us.”
“YEAH!” her students shout in unison. And how could they not be? Chart papers lined with timeless stanzas — “The Tiger” by William Blake, “Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams — adorn their classroom walls. During today’s Morning Meeting, they listen to their classmate, Bridget, as she reads aloud the Rose Fyleman poem “Mice.” “She didn’t rush through,” Miller says of Bridget’s reading. “Nice cadence.” Students raise their hands and draw comparisons between “Mice” and “The Pasture” by Robert Frost. They know poetry: its mechanics, its style, its practitioners. All that’s left, now, is to visit the Poetry Guy.
He’s Matt Sandbank, the nationally touring and Durham-based shadow puppeteer who performs literary-themed shows for young audiences and poetry workshops for students. The Mustangs from Miller’s class and the Lemurs from fourth grade teacher Chip Lupa’s class bring pencils and clipboards to the 3–4 Commons (the Lower School’s second-floor gathering space), where they sit in the amphitheatre-style gathering space and watch as Sandbank ducks behind a translucent screen. He tells the assembled students that he took up puppetry in college to cure his writer’s block — and, he says, “to not take myself so seriously.” He flips a switch and the screen, which is festooned in illustrated curtains, begins to glow, revealing a bespectacled shadow puppet of Sandbank as he performs midair flips and climbs the walls of his imaginary stage.
It is the magic of turning the unseen into the seen. “I can simply think about it and create … a hippopotamus!” The audience erupts into laughter as a hippo lumbers across the glowing screen.
Sandbank emerges from behind the screen and poses a simple question: “What’s the definition of poetry?” A flurry of outstretched arms greets him. “A way to write,” says one fourth grader. “A way for writers to express themselves,” another says. He helps them get more granular: using words to paint pictures and make music at the same time. It is a poet’s obligation, Sandbank says, to craft “words that are fun to say — and fun to listen to.”
He returns to the screen and spins a digital wheel that lands on the word “BABY.” “What are some words that come to mind?” Sandbank asks. Annoying. Diapers. Drooling. He smiles. “You guys are going to be great at this,” he says. “I can tell.”
It’s time for students to come up with their own images. They pick up their clipboards and record the images they wish to bring to poetic life. It is a kaleidoscope of 9- and 10-year-old imagination. A dog from Madagascar. A pumpkin. Basketball. Ballet. He challenges each student to think of a vivid supporting detail for their image. A snail running a marathon. (“Juxtaposition!”) A dinosaur astronaut. An albino jaguar in a jungle. Sandbank returns to the screen to reveal his own vivid — and unexpected — image. “A spider… tapdancing!” he exclaims as eight shadow legs skitter akimbo on the screen.
But perfecting imagery requires thoughtful labor. “If you keep working on these poems,” Sandbank later tells the fourth graders, “they’ll only get better.” He tasks the fourth graders with creating a list of words that pop into their head when they think of their image: nouns, action verbs, adjectives. Sandbank kneels to speak with one student and offers a few ideas. He chats with others as their lists grow, as does their imagery.
Now it’s time to make music. Sandbank asks students to focus on the sound that each word makes from his own spidery list. Nimble. Venom. Jiggle. “Jiggle!” Sandbank says, raising his pointer finger to the air. “That’s kind of a fun one to say.” He turns back to the fourth graders. “Start with two words that make an interesting pair — an interesting sound to say,” he says. The pairs arrive quickly. Boxing chicken. Funny fast. Cheeky cheetah. He laughs. “You guys already have a sense of rhythm,” he says. They turn next to similes and metaphors, and the room fills with a chorus of figurative language. Sandbank overhears two similes that he wants to share with the group. Hungry as a black hole. As weird as a balloon cat. Never mind that it doesn’t make perfect sense, Sandbank says. That’s the beauty of unrestrained expression. “You’ve been bit,” he tells the fourth graders, “by the poetry bug.”
The workshop has ended, though the work hasn’t. Students will spend the next few hours refining their poems before they return to the Commons for a poetry slam. One fourth grader lingers to tell Sandbank how much he loves Edgar Allan Poe; his favorite poem is “The Raven,” his favorite story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” As the Mustangs walk back to their classrooms, one boy holds his clipboard aloft and reads his poem to a classmate. One alliterative phrase drifts over the din of his departing classmates: Surprising secrets. Such is the mystery and beauty of poetry.
Both are abundant during the slam. Bridget — who hours before had recited “Mice” to the Mustangs — shares her own poem about a running snail, replete with vivid verbs like sweating and panting and slithering. Teo’s ode to basketball features a memorable simile that Sandbank reads again for the audience: A crossover so crusty you need a wet napkin to wipe. All of the poet’s tools of musicality — rhythm and repetition, alliteration and meter — spill out of the microphone into which each fourth grader recites their own creation. As big as a whale. As big as the universe. Sulking like seawater.
There is no sulking on this afternoon, however: only artistic triumph. Sandbank mentions that the famed American singer/songwriter Bruce Springsteen sometimes takes two years to write one three-minute song. The fourth graders at Durham Academy Lower School wrote a poem in less than a day. He asks them to applaud for each other, and for themselves. Sandbank shouts his most cherished mantra as the students repeat each line:
All power to the poets!
Images rule!
You know it
“If I can write it, so can you!”
For the fourth graders, their poetry turnaround capacity changed little from Sandbank’s workshop in October to the reveal of their final poems in December. Most fourth graders only needed a day to write the poem they would read aloud at the front of their classroom. By then, so much of their exposure to poems and poetry — to Blake and Frost and Worth — had seeped into their writing subconscious, and the prose poured out of them.
The poetry unit’s formal assessment required students to engage with the most invaluable part of writing: rewriting. Students revised their poems for word choice and punctuation, explaining and justifying each of their tweaks in graphic organizers that captured the evolution of their thinking. Some of the poems clinged to vestiges of the drafts they created with Sandbank. Teo’s “crossover so crusty” would morph into “Bounce,” an ode to a basketball’s rhythmic and soothing dribbling. Bounce, bounce/The orange ball/going down/the court/Bounce, bounce.
As part of their final presentation, each student recites their poem before reading an essay about the inspiration from their poem — including examples from the poem itself and a concluding thought for their audience. Their classmates offer two compliments and one wish, providing praise and feedback for poetic devices, pacing, confidence in delivery and photo choice for the Google Slides presentation that accompanies their essay.
The praise is profuse. Morgan’s “Twirl,” inspired by her love for gymnastics, features a palpable simile: Splat like a pancake on the mat. “It’s not just the visual,” Miller says of the simile’s power. “It’s the sound.” Harry’s “French Fries” owes its subject matter to his brother, who once ate French fries with his mouth open. Miller wonders aloud what other poet was inspired by everyday objects. She turns to the class. “Experts?” she asks with an arched eyebrow. The answer arrives simultaneously from multiple students: “Valerie Worth!” Addison shares her ode to udon and ramen in “Noodles,” which are dressed up in a blanket of broth. Miller shakes her head in wonder. “I mean, does that create some imagery in your mind or what?!” she asks.
So too does Fiona’s “Silent Dancing,” a tribute to music and movement. On music, she writes, dance depends. “By changing the order of the words,” Miller tells the Mustangs, “you give it that poetry feel — that rhythm and cadence.” It is something, Fiona writes in the closing line of her essay, that anyone — a Poetry Guy, a fourth grader, anyone who has ever dreamed of lending voice to expression — can dare to achieve.
“If I can write it,” Fiona says, “so can you!”