Poetry pals and illustrators.

I have found that one of the great pleasures of teaching is to share poetry and art with my students. Our library has some wonderful picture books that combine poetry and art. This lesson combines cooperative learning and collaboration of literature and the visual arts. We added into this mix, the collaboration between two different schools within the same district.

We started by encouraging the fourth grade classroom teachers to read poetry to their students every morning. In art class, the art teachers read poems, which had very expressive language to inspire the students to create an illustration. After reading a poem, students would illustrate the poem on a piece of paper in a box provided above the poem. We used colored pencils as our media. After a number of poems were completed, students bound their own books of illustrated poems with a cover, which they also decorated.

After their poetry books were completed, two teachers from each school taught a collaborative poetry lesson. We had the students recite a nursery rhyme, such as "Little Miss Muffett." We then had students do a quick (under a minute), small pencil illustration of the nursery rhyme. A few students were chosen to show what their interpretation was. The students were amazed by the variety of interpretations that were created. Next we created a graph, which compared, contrasted, and analyzed the styles of six different illustrators and how they interpreted the same nursery rhyme.

We talked about list poetry. List poems are an excellent way to introduce poetry to beginning writers. I wrote "Winter Fun" on the chalkboard. The class thought of a list of words, descriptions, or images; or they contributed one line to a collaborative class poem.

In a list poem, each line adds an image or description to support the title or main idea of the poem. Two students worked on one list poem. The poetry pals from each school exchanged their list poems. They were instructed to illustrate their poetry pal's poem. The teachers then returned the poems to their respective authors.

The students decorated a tag board frame to go with their own poem. They used colored pencils for their background and various collage materials, such as magazine pictures, to enhance their poem.

The final event was a poetry reading. We videotaped the cooperative student groups reading their poems and displaying the illustration by their poetry pals. These videos were then exchanged so that the students could see their "poetry pals" and admire their own illustrations.

NATIONAL STANDARD

Students identify connections between the visual arts and other disciplines in the curriculum.

Peggy Goldman is an art teacher at South Park Elementary School in Deerfield, Illinois. Working in collaboration with Ms. Goldman were: Cynthia Mitchell, the library media specialist at South Park; Penny Weinberg, an art teacher; and Sandy Palfrey, library media specialist at Wilmot Elementary School in Deerfield. Peghow6.cs.com