Fancy Word Playing

Hello! This blog post is the summary and story of my latest Humanities project, Working With Words. In this project we created poetry and just learned about poems in general. The driving question for this project is “How might I construct text that shows who I am right now?” For this project we didn’t actually have groups but instead each class we were given a new random group. One thing (whenever I put brackets after a poem name in this post, its not the actual definition but what the teachers wanted us to do. This could include the definition though so you need to be on your toes).

The first thing we did was look at the adult world connection and why are we learning this. We can skip over that. (its a little boring) But after we were given our groups for the class we started the first activity. We were given a cut up poem and we were to recreate it in any order. The cut up poem we were we were given was My (or the father. I forgot) Father by Fred Wah. It goes like this:

My Father hurt-

Ing at the table

Sitting hurting

At suppertime

Deep inside very

Far down inside

Because I can’t stand the ginger

In the beef and greens

He cooked for us tonight

And years latter tonight

That look on his face

Appears now on mine

My children

My food

Their food

My father

Their father

Me mine

The father

Very far

Very very far

Inside

It’s about something along the lines of the father is hurting because the kids are ungrateful and then the kid become father. My groups poem had the same meaning expect with the bit about the kid becoming the father. Then we learned of the final thing we were going to make for this project; an ebook with all the poems we will write. What? We will be writing poetry. Yes we will be. And then we will put it in the ebook with meaning statements and complementary texts. Meaning statements describe what the poem is about and the complementary texts are either audio, photo, drawing, or text that complements the poem. You want to see my ebook? You’ll have to wait until the end of the post:). We then learned how to read poetry all fancy like. Now that we were “real poets” with our white hair, quills, and tea we can start writing poems. We were assigned two poems to write. A simile one (10 lines, describe your worldview with similes

) and an extended metaphor (6-8 sentences, compare a part of your worldview to something else) poem.

After that I became sick and had to spend the next class at my home. During this time I wrote some Haikus (3, show a change in the third line results from a shift in your worldview) and a found poem (choose a text that reveals something about your worldview that is at least 50/100 words, cut in half, write 3-5 sentences at the end showing how you changed the original text). I got a lot of help writing them with my mother dearest so big thanks to her. The next class I was able to be there and we “painted with words.” Aka we played around with alliteration and assonance. Then we read some poem and then off we go to the next period. But not to quick for the teachers to give us the next poem to do. This time it was a imagery one (using alliteration and assonance, 10-15 lines, describe a part of your worldview that you haven’t discussed before). Next class again I was sick at home. I didn’t do the activity that we did in class so I just wrote the Sound poem (10-15 lines, what is the sound of your worldview ). I found the Sound poem a little stupid because its kind of just sound with little meaning.

Now I really started working on the ebook and finish the last poems experience poem (15-20 lines, using denotation/connotation, mood, and a specific theme, describe an experience that shaped your worldview), personification poem (10-15 lines, personify worldview itself (this could be your group’s poem or you can write your own) and self-portrait poem (25-30 lines, who are you?). After that I really started working on the ebook and adding pictures and poems to it. Now I think thats about it for now.