Recently my sixth grade students went on
a field trip to the New Britain American Art Museum. We go on this trip every year during our unit
on poetry. The students took a
docent-led tour of the various art exhibits.
After the tours, each student selects their favorite piece of art to
write a sensory poem from notes they collected that day.
When students returned to school, they
began working on brainstorming and creating their art-inspired poems. I showed students my favorite piece of art
and the poem I created from it.
Before publishing the final copy of
their poem, we practiced looking for boring plain words to change awesome
adjective and vivid verbs. I demonstrated
with a sample poem by circling words that I thought were meaningless or boring
and used a thesaurus and www.thesaurus.com to find words that were meaningful.
The students loved using the thesaurus and readily shared the new words
they discovered. I stopped here, passed
back their museum poems, and allowed time to circle boring words and replace
them with ones that are meaningful. Some
students said that they could not find any words in there writing they wanted
to change. I suggested they have a
friend look for words they thought might need improvement. This worked for them, because their
classmates saw something they had not.
Students then typed up their revised
rough drafts and shared in small groups in the class.
Here is one art inspired poem:
Written
by: Lily
Beach in Hawaii
Inspired
By: Heesoo Lee
Hibiscus
flowers which are as garnet colored
as a
cluster of cherries on a bleached porch on the fourth of July.
Brownish-greenish
stems and plum colored leaves
shaped
like a fuchsia colored surfboard lying on the soft sand in the early morning
sun.
Cobalt
colored, frosty froth covered
ocean
waves crashing against the gray, rocky shore.
Tiny
hummingbirds chirping an energetic melody on a white birch branch in the
magical time between dawn and morning.
Soft,
smooth, scarlet petals of the Jatropha
flowers
waving in
the breeze like ripe, ruby colored tomatoes waiting to be picked.
The cool
summer breeze blowing my ebony colored, glossy, wavy hair
like I’m
on a boat at dusk.
Fresh
mango jam, the color of a softly lit flame
in a obscure
cave on the cold mountain side.
Fresh golden,
clover honey, dribbled over a refreshing fruit salad
waiting to
be savored and consumed.
Golden lemons
being cut and squeezed into a
frosted
glass pitcher full of pure, tasteless water and sweet, white sugar.
A emerald
colored garden full of pearl-white jasmine flowers
swaying as
the summer breeze pushes them to release their sweet-smelling fragrance.
I feel safe,
calm, and free like a bird.
