Experience, Feel, Write, Repeat

Ekphrastic Engagement in the First Grade Classroom

David Ostheimer

Introduction

Ekphrasis - “Description” in Greek. An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.1

In my classroom we already respond to art with basic observation, what do you see, think, and wonder about a piece of art. I want to start with these observations and grow them into coherent passages. I would then like to reframe the students’ ideas as poetry. I want to look at various types of poems and pick a few structures that the student can choose to use to write about an image. Finally, I want to look at some photographic images about the state of our planet and have students write about the emotional impact that these images produce in them.

Background

The elementary school where I teach is comprised of many different kinds of students with a variety of beliefs and experiences. Our school has approximately 1200 students from Kindergarten through 5th grade. There are nine 1st grade classrooms eight with instruction in English and one Spanish immersion classroom. This year I will have up to 25 students from Hispanic, African, Caribbean, Asian and Middle Eastern cultures as well as students whose families are from the United States. My classes, historically, have been around 50% African American, 30% White and 20% other ethnicities and are usually a close split between boys and girls. Socio-economically, my class will also be diverse with all economic classes represented. My school is a Title 1 school and qualifies for free lunch for all students.

Learning Objectives

This is a unit that can be taught over many lessons and can be done at various times during the year. Once a poetic structure is learned, students can practice during morning work, writing time, and or during centers. The goal of this unit is to have students create their own works of poetry based upon various works of art. We will start by reading and or listening to poetry. When students have a basic understanding of poetry we will work

on writing our own. Some of my students have a difficulty in getting their thoughts down on paper, to help scaffold, I will provide examples of the poem structure we are using and provide a class generated word bank for students to use. For my beginning writers, those still struggling with letter formation and using inventive spelling, their poems can be scribed so that their ideas can be shared with the class. Student poems will have the additional goal of helping my students to develop empathy, an important component of being human. Students will then share out their work using various platforms including an end of year gallery walk and poetry reading. One iPad app that students enjoy using is Chatterpix. This allows students to use an image, create a mouth in it, and then record their voices. This would be a fun and nonintimidating way for students to show the pertinent image and share their work.

Rationale

My students do not travel much, most have never been to a large city or even Wilmington nor have they ever been to an art museum. The majority of art that they have experienced are pieces that they have created in their art class or posters they see on classroom walls. I enjoy their reactions when I show them pieces by Dali or Pollock as well as those by Michelangelo and da Vinci. Their experience with poetry is also extremely limited. They are exposed to rhymes in preschool and Kindergarten but a concentrated study of poetry is not, too my knowledge, ever attempted. An occasional Shel Silverstein or Jack Prelutsky poem is read and laughed over but poetry as a serious medium of communication is never contemplated.

In Keys to Creative Writing, Gerald Fleming wonders why teachers don’t willingly teach poetry. He recounts a story where a wrestler, the bad guy, was named “The Genius” and tortured the fans with poetry. They couldn’t wait for the hero to take this arrogant intellectual to task. Poetry has become “perceived as a pursuit of pseudointellectuals or even intellectuals.” “It’s for the elite!”2 But, he asserts, nothing can be further from the truth. Poetry is a great way to open the door to creative writing. Any child can excel, “Here’s a medium of writing where it’s all O.K.! Lines don’t need to be capitalized, punctuation can be manipulated to a student’s content, and mistakes can be made to “work”. Complete sentences need not be used.”3

The poet, Louis Ginsberg, father to Allen Ginsburg of “Beat Generation” fame, was asked by someone working on his doctoral dissertation, “Why teach poetry?” Ginsberg gives an answer, 70 years ago, that seems to resonate today: “In our modern times of tension and anxiety, when material values seem most important, we seem to lose sight of higher values which make life all the more worth living.” He goes on to say: “...poetry reveals to us the deep springs of human action; poetry makes vivid and brings home to us higher values which the spirit of man yearns for.”4 Poetry makes us our best selves. In writing poetry, we can throw off the conventions and expectations of the day to day in search of something transcendent. It has been 70 years since Ginsburg wrote that, and I

am sure in that 70 years the teaching of poetry both of reading and writing it has been shunted to the margins of our curriculum…. and it seems that our world full of “tension and anxiety” has only become more so.

Another reason to use poetry in the classroom is the novelty of it. First grade students are used to their decodable texts, the familiar picture books, and, if whatever other early reader text they are offered. They are rarely asked to read poetry. To read and hear words that come at them with rhyme and rhythm will engage the students in a different way. Repeated readings will help with annunciation, fluency and prosody. Shared readings with easily deduced rhymes will help reluctant readers with their confidence. In Poetry Across the Curriculum, Aaren Yeatts Perry states that “Poetry study trains on in many modes of thinking; nonlinear, free thinking, sequential, ordered, critical and scientific thinking; musical and rhythmic thinking; and philosophical thinking.”5 These higher order thinking skills are the holy grail of our classroom discussions.

My students use their observation skills to look at images and write about them. We do this as part of our “Work on Writing” Center during Daily 5, an ELA center management system I use in my classroom. I want to take these basic observations and grow them into more coherent passages. When students are comfortable looking at art and responding ekphrastically, I would like to take that a step further and incorporate some of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals ( https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ ) into their work. This would include looking at images/artwork that references one or more of the goals such as “Quality Education”, “Life on Land” or “Life Below Water” and then having students write reflections via poetry about the importance of the goal (as highlighted in the work) to not only their life but life in the world. I would want to use the artwork and poetry to foster empathy in my students at the micro level – themselves, classmates, schoolmates to the macro level, community members and then out to populations around the world. This project could also use artwork created by the students in Art class in reference to one of the goals. Themes for this project could revolve around Earth Day, World Oceans Day, Martin Luther King, or Thanksgiving. We will address Common Core State Standards in Reading and Writing for 1st grade.

Content

Poetry

No unit on poetry can be taught without an understanding of what poetry is. According to poetry.com,

“Poetry (ancient Greek: ποιεω (poieo) = I create) is an art form in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to,

or instead of, its notional and semantic content. It consists largely of oral or literary works in which language is used in a manner that is felt by its user and audience to differ from ordinary prose.” Furthermore, it states, “It may use condensed or compressed form to convey emotion or ideas to the reader's or listener's mind or ear; it may also use devices such as assonance and repetition to achieve musical or incantatory effects. Poems frequently rely for their effect on imagery, word association, and the musical qualities of the language used. The interactive layering of all these effects to generate meaning is what marks poetry.” 6

“Poetry appeals to the mind and arouses feelings. Poetry may state facts, but, more important, it makes imaginative statements that we may value even if its facts are incorrect”7

Poems include rhythm and meter. In poetry pre-measured patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables are called meters. Stressed syllables are long sounding and unstressed are short sounding. Meters are the pattern of feet within a sentence. Feet are individual units of rhythm made up of patterns of syllables. A sentence is made up of one or more feet. There are 5 Rhythms in poetry:

To form a line of verse a poet can use repetitions of feet. Rhythm is a natural effect within poetry. The meter of a sentence and which feet used to make that sentence are what give the poem its effect and flow.8

So, if poetry is an art form that uses oral or written language to evoke emotions and feelings and poetry does not have to be factual but values creativity and imagination, it seems right in the wheelhouse of my first graders. Why isn’t it in mine? Maybe as I write and model for my students, I will become a poet, too!

Types of Poetry

There are many different types of poetry. If you do a Google search for Poetic Forms, you will come up with many different answers: 3 types, 50 types, 80 types. I will narrow this down to the types of poetry I feel are appropriate for our 1st graders to write. You may have a Shakespeare ready to write some sonnets but there are far more accessible poems for most of our 6-year-old authors. Complete definitions and examples can be found at www.youngwriters.co.uk.

Acrostic

Acrostic poems are poems that take a word and line that word up vertically. Each letter would then start a word or phrase that pertains to the original word.

Cinquain

A cinquain poem has five lines, the first line has two syllables, the second has four syllables, the third has six, the fourth eight, and the fifth line has two syllables. The lines are unrhymed but about a subject or theme.

Diamante

A Diamante poem has seven lines. The first line has one word, the subject. The second line has two describing words about the first line. The third line has three action words about the first line. The fourth line has a short phrase that is about both the first and seventh line. The fifth line has three action words about the seventh line. The sixth line has two describing words about line seven. Line seven has one words, another subject, usually related to the first subject.

Free Verse

Free Verse is poetry that is written, rhymed or unrhymed, that has no set meter to it.

Haiku

Haiku is a traditional Japanese poem that has 17 syllables in three unrhymed lines of five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables. Haiku is traditionally written on the subject of nature. Modern haiku does not always follow the rules, but, according to Poets.org, “the philosophy of haiku has been preserved: the focus on a brief moment in time; a use of provocative, colorful images; an ability to be read in one breath; and a sense of sudden enlightenment and illumination.”9

Shape or Concrete Poem

A shape or concrete poem is just what it sounds like, a poem in the shape of it subject. If you write a poem about a cat, you would write it in the shape of a cat, a cloud in the shape of a cloud, and so on.

Tanka

A Tanka is another traditional Japanese poetic form similar to the Haiku but has two more lines, lines four and five, of seven syllables.

Ekphrases

Poetic writing about art has been around in the West since the time of Homer. His description of Achilles’ shield in Book 18 of The Iliad is the first known example of ekphrastic writing.10 ( https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/iliad-book-xviii-shield-achilles ) The goal of this literary form is to make the reader envision the thing described as if it were physically present. In many cases, however, the subject never actually existed, making the ekphrastic description a demonstration of both the creative imagination and the skill of the writer. For most readers of famous Greek and Latin texts, it did not matter whether the subject was actual or imagined. The texts were studied to form habits of thinking and writing, not as art historical evidence. 11 For first graders, we will experience art that exists. At some point we may be able to imagine a piece and write about it but I believe our students will need to respond to concrete items.

Art

Have you ever stood in front of a work of art and had an emotional reaction? Have you listened to music and felt the message that the composer was trying to convey? Why does the artist create the art? The Oxford Dictionary online defines Art as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.”12 I want my students to experience the works and create their own work based off of their reaction. Students will begin the process by looking at famous works of art and responding to those. Art will be from Western and Asian sources but we will work with art from whatever culture we are studying. If I do a unit on Anansi we can respond to African art, a unit on Coyote we can respond to Native American art and so on. Once this skill is established, we can revisit ekphrastic writing throughout the year. In this unit we will also be responding to “nonfiction” art such as photographs and maybe short videos. We can also write about other art forms and not just visual art. We can write ekphrastically about music or dance or cooking, about anything that appeals to our senses.

Empathy

Poetry appeals to the mind and arouses feelings.13 I want my students to use their poetry to help develop empathy rather than sympathy. It is important for our students to be able to understand and share the feelings of others rather than feel pity for someone. Empathy can empower our students to make real changes in our world. In first grade, developing empathy in our students is a major focus. We read books such as Everyone is Welcome, I am Human, and Be Kind and talk about what it means to show empathy. As part of this unit, I want to introduce some of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as themes for our ekphrastic writing to help continue the development of empathy in my students.

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

In 2012, the United Nations produced 17 universal goals to meet the environmental, political, and economic challenges facing our world. The goals may be viewed at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs . I especially want to concentrate on Sustainable Development Goal 4, Quality Education, Sustainable Development Goal 14, Life Below Water, and Sustainable Development Goal 15, Life on Land.

The aim of Goal 4, Quality Education, is to ensure inclusive and equitable, quality education to promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. The aim of Goal 14, Life Below Water, is to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development. The aim of Goal 15, Life on Land, is to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, and biodiversity loss.14 We will look at images from National Geographic, Arkive, and other sources that will stir some sort of feeling in my students that can be applied to the goals. Ruby Bridges walking into school. Dolphins in a sea of plastic. An orangutan orphan in a tree with a palm tree plantation in the background. Students will take the feelings that the photos spark and put that into poetry and then upload those to a YouTube channel or create a classroom book. Other sustainable development goals would also lend themselves to this unit.

Teaching Strategies

My classroom is setup in table groups of four students. Students are grouped heterogeneously by reading scores. We do a lot of partner activities with each place at the table assigned a number 1-4 and a letter, either A or B. This helps with classroom management with “1’s work with 3’s, 2’s with 4’s and partner A goes first” helping to cut down on the time spent pairing up students. Students also do a lot of talking amongst themselves about the material we are covering. Students participate in “Timed Pair Share” activities where each child, after think time, gets a chance to explain their thinking

to their partner and then a few will report out on their conversations to the class. We also do an activity called “Quiz Quiz Trade” where students have cards with something on it, for this unit it might be a picture of an emotion, where they have to identify the item (read a word, solve a problem, etc.), switch cards with their partner, and then find a new partner.

In my class, we are also working on sentence writing. When we do this unit, we will have finished the handwriting potion of our writing instruction and will be on sentence writing. We are learning about subjects and predicates, basically who did what. It will be interesting to see after the very structured organized way we are looking at and writing sentences how students will respond to the relative freedom that poetry allows. As Fleming stated in Keys to Creative Writing, a complete sentence? Don’t worry about it, you just need five syllables. Punctuation? Not so important. I want my students to be able to enjoy the playful and experimental aspects of poetry writing that they don’t always get with our sentence writing instruction.

We also use technology in our classroom. I am lucky enough to have a set of iPads (not 1:1) that students can use to increase engagement. Two apps that the students enjoy using are Chatterpix and Draw and Tell. Using these apps, students can download the work of Art and then recite their poem and upload it when finished. I can then share their work out with parents, administrators, and other interested parties and no one need worry about legibility.

Classroom Activities

Lesson 1: Responding to Art

5 Days

Content objectives: Students will respond to artistic works using appropriate language. Students will write about what they see, what they think, and what they wonder. Students will then write about how the art makes them feel.

Day 1: Introduce the concept to the class. Show an image of a favorite piece of art. I like to use Salvador Dali’s “Persistence of Memory” ( https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79018 ). Model how you can write about what they see in the painting, what they think about the painting, and what they wonder about the painting. “I see clocks, some have insects on them and they look like they are melting. There is water, a cliff, a tree, and some sort of something with eyelashes.” “I think that the painting is weird. I think the painting has to do with time” I wonder why the clocks are melting. I wonder what that white thing is. I wonder why the artist painted this.” “This painting makes me feel scared. This painting makes me curious.”

Day 2: Show another panting such as “Marooned” by Howard Pyle ( https://www.delart.org/collections/american-illustration/marooned/ )

Again, model seeing, thinking, and wondering. How does the person in the painting feel? How does the painting make you feel? Have students write down their thoughts. “I see _______.” I think ________.” “I wonder_____.” and “I feel ________.” You can also have students draw and color their own version of the artwork.

Day 3 – 5. Show other work from artists such as Rene Magritte ( https://www.renemagritte.org/ ), Leonardo da Vinci ( https://www.leonardodavinci.net/ ), or Andy Warhol ( https://www.moma.org/artists/6246 ). You can also show photographs of statues, pottery, or photography. Have students respond as they have during the past lessons.

Lesson 2: Poetry

8 days

Introduction to Poetry

1 Day

Content Objectives: Students will be introduced to poetry by reading and or listening to a selection of grade appropriate poems. Day 1: On the internet there are many websites with poetry that are appropriate for 1st graders such as https://www.weareteachers.com/50-must-share-poems-for-elementary-school/. Read a selection of poems to the kids and enjoy the sound of the language. Show them the poems on the board and ask how they look different than the sentences that they write. You can tell students that poems can break the rules that we have learned about in writing and that they will be writing their own poems.

Poetry Structures

7 days

Content objectives: Listen and respond to different poetry structures, write poems as a class, and write poems independently.

Day 1: Acrostic Poem

There are many acrostic poems available on the web, find or write your own poem and share it with the students. Ask students what they notice about the poem – each word starts with one letter of the theme word. Choose an appropriate word such as the month, season or holiday and, as a class, write a poem. Then choose (or have students choose) a word and have the students write and illustrate one poem individually. Have students share their poems with their table groups.

Day 2 – 7: Follow the above template with other types of poems that you would like to study, cinquain, diamante, free verse, haiku, shape, and tanka, introduce the structure, write one as a class, write one and illustrate it individually, and then share. You might vary the way students share so, over a week, they have an opportunity to share with everyone in the class. You can scaffold for students by providing a template and/or a word bank. Using the Chatterpix app, you can take a picture of student illustrations and have them read and record their poems. The poems can then be uploaded to a YouTube channel and shared with families. This unit is also an excellent time to review the use of

nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns etc. Remind students that the rules of sentence writing need not apply to their poems, punctuation and capitalization may be creatively omitted. They can be as free and creative as they can be.

Lesson 3: Putting It All Together

6+ Days

Content Objectives: Students will look at a piece of art and then respond to it using one of the poetry structures we have studied.

Day 1:

Show students a work of art that you looked at previously. Discuss what students see, think, and wonder about the piece and write ideas on the board or chart paper. At some point before the lesson, make a small cut-out of a nondescript person that you can attach to the piece of art to represent the student being in the artwork. Ask students to imagine they are that person. When they are in the art does it change the answers to their “see, think, wonder” questions? How do they feel being in the scene? Add their response to the list. Choose a structure and, using their recorded ideas, create a poem. Read the poem aloud. Have students write the poem down and allow them to change words to personalize the poem.

Day 2: Use a different work of art and repeat the process but use a different structure. Again, allow the students to personalize the poem.

Day 3: Use a different work of art, create the word list, choose an appropriate structure but allow students to write their own poem. Share poems with their table group.

Day 4 Do the same as Day3.

Day 5: Do the same as before but give students the option of using a work and a structure of their own choosing. Students who are not ready for that challenge can work modifying a poem with the group but this will allow differentiation for your more confident writers.

Extension: One activity that we did in seminar which would be interesting to do with the students is to have each student respond to a different work of art without showing it to their partner. They would write a poem, in the style of their choice, about the image. They would then share their poem with their partner. After sharing, students would reveal their image and discuss their thought process in writing the poem. Their partner would discuss what they thought the work of art was about, how it was similar to what the poet saw and how it was different.

Lesson 4 – The Two E’s: Ekphrasis and Empathy

Content Objective: Students will look at a photograph illustrating one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and then respond to it using one of the poetry structures we have studied.

Day1 and 2: We have put our students “into” a painting by having them imagine they are the figure that we attached to a work of art. We have asked them how they feel in the painting. The next step is to put them in the shoes of the subject of the work. Now, this may not be possible for a 1st grader with a painting such as Kazimir Malevich’s

"Suprematist Composition: White on White" ( https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80385 ) but they may be able to more readily access the feelings of the pirate in Howard Pyle’s “Marooned” or the “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo Da Vinci. Empathy, according to diffen.com, “is the ability to experience the feelings of another person. It goes beyond sympathy, which is caring and understanding for the suffering of others.”15The works that we might ask our students to identify with do not have to include suffering, they could (and should) elicit other emotions, as well. This is something that will need to be modeled for students. A poem about confusion using Magritte’s “Son of Man” (https://www.renemagritte.org/the-son-of-man.jsp), joy using Iris Scott’s “Shaking off the Blues” ( https://tinyurl.com/y7t2hyub ), or competition using Leroy Neiman’s “Shaq” ( https://rogallery.com/neiman_leroy/w-778/neiman-shaq.html ) are just some examples of art that can evoke human feeling. Day3: One of my objectives in this unit is to expose my students to some of the challenges that we have in our world. The UN has put together their Sustainable Development Goals and I want to explore one or more of these as part of my unit. One I will explore is Goal 15 Life On Land: “A flourishing life on land is the foundation for our life on this planet. We are all part of the planet’s ecosystem and we have caused severe damage to it through deforestation, loss of natural habitats and land degradation. Promoting a sustainable use of our ecosystems and preserving biodiversity is not a cause. It is the key to our own survival.”16My students love learning about animals and many of the ones we study are endangered: polar bears, penguins, big cats, and great apes. Using what we have learned in other subjects, students will respond, poetically, to photographs of endangered animals. I will challenge my students to write a haiku as that is the form that focuses “on images from nature” and “emphasizes simplicity, intensity, and directness of expression.”17

Day 3 and 4: Continue with the practice using other images and, if necessary, other forms.

Culminating Activity: Students will choose a poem to read at a Poetry Slam. Students will also choose a favorite ekphrastic poem that they have written and, after downloading the work of art onto the app “Chatterbox”, students will record a reading of their ekphrastic poem and combine the image with the words. You can upload their project to YouTube and then link that to a QR code (https://www.the-qrcode-generator.com/). with the QR codes attached, visitors, using iPads, can do a gallery walk. You can invite parents, administrators, etc. into the classroom to enjoy the students’ poetry, bongos are optional.

Resources

"Art | Definition of Art in English by Oxford Dictionaries." Oxford Dictionaries | English. Accessed January 13, 2019. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/art.

"Ekphrasis." Poetry Foundation. Accessed January 13, 2019. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/ekphrasis.

"Empathy vs Sympathy." Diffen. Accessed January 13, 2019. https://www.diffen.com/difference/Empathy_vs_Sympathy.

Fleming, Gerald J., and Gerald J. Fleming. Keys to Creative Writing: Activities to Unlock Imagination in the Classroom. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991.

Helpful ideas for teaching creative writing in the classroom.

"Goal 15: Life on Land." The Global Goals. Accessed January 13, 2019. https://www.globalgoals.org/15-life-on-land.

Information on SDG 15 Life on Land

Kennedy, Joe X. J. Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. S.l.: PEARSON, 2019.

Works of poetry to use for examples.

Munsterberg, Marjorie. "Writing About Art." Visual Description - Writing About Art. Accessed January 13, 2019. http://writingaboutart.org/pages/ekphrasis.html.

Perry, Aaren Yeatts. Poetry across the Curriculum: An Action Guide for Elementary Teachers. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1997.

Using poetry in all aspects of elementary school instruction.

"SDGs .:. Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform." United Nations. Accessed January 13, 2019. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs.

Information about the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Smiley, Jerome. "Remembering Louis: Why Teach Poetry?" The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas 71, no. 3 (1998) pg 140. doi:10.1080/00098659809599345.

Anecdote illustrating why teach poetry

"The State of the Preface Address: On Wordsworth and Common Speech." Poets.org. October 02, 2015. Accessed January 13, 2019. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/haiku-poetic-form.

"What Is Poetry." Poetry.org. Accessed January 13, 2019. http://www.poetry.org/whatis.htm.

"What Is Rhythm and Meter." Young Writers. Accessed January 13, 2019. https://www.youngwriters.co.uk/terms-rhythm.

Poetry Glossary

"Writing About Art." Visual Description - Writing About Art. Accessed January 13, 2019. http://writingaboutart.org/pages/ekphrasis.html.

Appendix

Appendix A

This unit will implement Common Core State Standards for Literature and for Writing. Emphasis will be placed on Craft and Structure with students identifying words and phrases in stories or poems that suggest feelings or appeal to the senses. Emphasis will be placed on Key Ideas and Details, including asking and answering questions about key details in a text. Students will follow accepted rules for discussion of ideas and be able to ask and answer questions about the readings and be able to describe people, places, things, and events with relevant details and in complete sentences. When writing, with guidance and support from adults, students will focus on a topic, respond to questions and suggestions from peers, and add details to strengthen writing as needed. They will also use a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing.

Notes