At the beginning of our poetry unit, I had the chance to reflect on my past poetry experiences in school. When looking back at my reflection, I realized just how much I dreaded poetry. In school, poetry meant reading and analyzing poem after poem to figure out the meaning of it, which was challenging. Furthermore, poetry was pushed as a piece of writing that needed to rhyme because it sounded nice and flowed. After having these experiences that instilled poetry as a strict, structured, narrow piece of writing, it made me very disinterested in it.
This semester in my teaching language arts graduate class, we covered a poetry unit. Now I have to admit, I was a little nervous when first hearing that we will cover poetry in the class, making me dread the unit to come. But oh, was I wrong! This experience with poetry has been mind-changing. Dr. Frye has opened my eyes to the flexibility, freedom, imagination, creativity, and broad-ranging ideas that poetry encompasses. She has instilled the importance of creating invitations for students that will get them excited, inspired, and eager to write. This semester we have explored a variety of invitations that get us out in nature on wonder walks, looking at photos or objects, watching videos, exploring mentor poems, pulling words, phrases, and quotes from our past writing or environment around, and turning our "daily talk" into poems! Getting to experience these poetry invitations have shown me just how imperative they are for getting students writing. Picking up a pencil and beginning to write poetry can be hard, as in any type of writing, so guiding students in starting a poem is crucial. Whether its through an invitation that gets students out into nature, exploring a mentor text as a model for borrowing words, syntactic structure, or inspiration, utilizing students' past writing, or really honing in our students' surroundings, feelings, and senses, invitations are one of the most important steps to writing poetry.
Aside from creating poetry invitations and experiences for myself and fellow graduate students, my professors have done an AMAZING job of expanding these invitations to engage young learners in writing, poetry, and comics through their Zoom Literacy Casts with the Anderson Reading Clinic each week. I have been fortunate enough to be a part of many of these zooms, getting to see the magnitude of young learners they are impacting. These zoom sessions are so fun, engaging, informative, motivating, and heartwarming to see the massive amount of students voluntarily getting on each day to expand their minds, knowledge, skills, and creativity. This goes to show that students can love writing if you engage them in enjoyable, relatable, and age-appropriate writing activities and expectations! As a future teacher, it has been so educational to see my professors work in action with real life young learners. They have been wonderful models on how to engage students online, using invitations, enthusiasm, and student involvement to get students writing. It is amazing to see students both young and old, actively chatting and participating for an hour at a time, even continuing to write and post their work after the sessions each day. I can't thank Dr. Frye, Dr. Ward, Dr. DeHart, my peers, and all the guest poets and authors that have put in so much time and hard work to make these literacy casts so wonderful. They have impacted more people than they know!
In the past, I definitely dreaded poetry writing, but after getting to experience poetry in a new light, my outlook on poetry has changed. I now see the importance of poetry for learning and expanding your mind, knowledge, and imagination. For me, writing and exploring poetry has been very therapeutic these past couple weeks, allowing me to reflect and take notice of my surroundings, feelings, and experiences in this unusual time. At the beginning of the semester, I never expected myself to grow as a poet and writer like I have, but I am so grateful.
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