Wednesday, November 18, 2015

He's a Poet and He Didn't Know It

My son Ty loathes ELA (English-Language Arts).  This year in particular, ELA is not fun for him at all.  Part of his class assignments have included writing short stories and poems, which he would likely rank in the top 5 things he would rather not do in a day.

This week his assignment was to "write a poem, 6 - 12 lines long about a particular emotion or experience of his choice."  He chose to write about his dog, Vimy, and I love what he wrote.  He gave me permission to share it on my blog.  I wanted to post it to Facebook but he denied me that request.  I assured him that my blog readership is basically a handful of people, so it will have little exposure.  With his assignment he also included a picture of himself with Vimy the day he got her, and I've included that here as well.  The last component of his assignment was to recite his poem and submit the voice recording to his teacher for evaluation.  I'm sure that was his least favourite part, and there's no way he'd give permission for me to include that on my blog, so you'll have to just read it for yourself . . .


Vimy

When I got my puppy I wasn’t really sure
Which one to pick, with what colour of fur;
The puppy I chose really picked me.
She was soft and black and I named her Vimy.
On the ride home she sat on my lap;
I hugged her and loved her until we got back.
She seemed really happy to come to my home,
And I felt the same—that she was my own.






3 comments:

michelle said...

Wow! He did a great job. One of the things I did when Matthew was in 9th grade (but it would work for any year...Isaac is doing it this year as well, though MUCH simplified!) was to get a scrapbook that you can slide pages into. For Isaac, he completes a poetry frame and then I mount the poem on a piece of scrapbook paper and then he does some kind of art project...sometimes relating to the poem and sometimes not, which gets mounted on the page opposite, so each double-page spread has a poem and a piece of his art. At Matthew's 9th Grade level, he picked a theme and then wrote a variety of poems on that theme (a haiku, a sonnet, a limerick, a free verse, etc.) and then decorated the page to reflect the subject of his poem with pictures or drawings or stickers. He put a table of contents at the front and at the end of the month he had a beautiful keepsake.

I always like to have the kids do at least one thing like this each year (we don't always accomplish that goal though) of some kind of representation of the year. We have done a similar kind of thing where we scrapbooked and wrote about the Civil War, Isaac has made alphabet books that he still looks at, etc.

Ty's poem is special because it is deeply personal. I appreciate him allowing you to share it with your little readership.

~Rain``` said...

Beautiful and sincere words, Ty. Well done. ~ Auntie Rain

Connie Mae Inglis said...

Loved the poem. Send my thumbs up approval to Ty as a Language Arts teacher. I felt his emotion and joy over his new puppy which is what poetry is supposed to do.

I know when I was teaching 9th grade, a number of students groaned when we started our poetry section. THEN, I told them to bring in their favourite song or two with the lyrics printed out. I used those lyrics to show them how music is poetry and a musician who ever wants to write good lyrics, needs to learn what makes good poetry, not even necessarily the rhyming aspects but the images and metaphor and figures of speech that make a good poem a great poem and, a good song, a great song.