Hi there! How’s that pear? Are you a bear? Do you care? How’s your hair? As you may have guessed from that AAAAA rhyme scheme, our latest unit that we have been working on in HUM 10 is poetry! Poetry is a very controversial topic within our class, half of us love it but half of us don’t which is understandable. Most of the time poetry can be boring and hard to understand, but if you look into a poem deeper it can actually be fun to learn about. Intertwined with our studies on poetry, was historical perspective and how these two topics work together. These two ideas, Historical Perspective and Poetry, actually form our driving question which I will answer through out this blog post. “How does our understanding of a text help us understand an idea?” Alright, see you guys on the flip side!
SOME OF MY FAVS
First off, before we get to far into explaining the whole goal of this project, I want to introduce you to some of my favourite Stepping Stone and Milestone activities.
POETRY TERM POSTERS
By far, my favourite activity we did was the poetry term posters. Each person in the class got two different terms to research and create a definition poster with an example and a picture. The day that I created these posters was Halloween, I was dressed up as a swimmer, hence the water wing theme!
This was a small activity but it taught me that poetry can be fun! Making my own poster and definition and then listening to everyone present really helped me memorize all of the terms that I needed to know.
AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
Before this activity, historical was really hard for me to grasp and understand. We studied different parts for the civil war and how Abraham Lincoln freeing the slaves played a huge roll. Depending on how we look at Lincoln now vs. Back then varies quite a lot because of peoples perspective. This could work for any topic, even Change and revolution. **hint hint** This is what the wall length white board looked like once our class was done researching and reading about topics like the Emancipation Proclamation.
SOME OF MY FAVOURITE POEMS
This wasn’t necessarily an activity we did, these were just a couple poems that we read that I REALLY enjoyed. They are called “Puce Fairy Book” by Alice Major and “There Was Once” by Margaret Atwood. (Click the links to check em out)
These poems were very focused on women empowerment and how us women can’t be the perfect princesses people want us to be. They really helped me understand the concept of theme as the them is very prominent in both poems.
THE ACTUAL PROJECT
Once we practiced writing poems and paragraphs about historical perspective, it was time to put that learning to use for our final project….. A Poetry Open House for our parents! Our task was to choose a poem from the past, a poem from now, a song, a poem written by us, and two poems of our choice in groups of five. My group was Amelia, Kiyaan, Caleb and Anika.
Though, there was a twist, all 6 of these poems had to fit under one idea that connected to the driving question. This is what our personalized, new and improved driving question looked like:
How can poetry help us understand how change drives revolution?
It is important to note that this question was a process to create. We went through several different ideas (death, time, anger, revolution, etc.) and different wordings of the question. Drafts are very important when it comes to project based learning, because the more drafts you do the better your product will get each time.
After about three classes we finally chose our poems/songs. I was thinking about showing you guys each individual one, but instead I decided to leave it for a surprise when you see the video of our coffee house presentation, don’t worry, it is coming soon enough. PATIENCE. Since practice makes perfect, our group practiced and practiced and practiced some more until the presentation was flawless. I am very proud of how it turned out and I hope you enjoy!
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CONCLUSION
Poetry. Is. Awesome. Wow, I never thought I would say that…. but it’s true. This project has taught me just how much deeper poetry is than what you think, how much the text you are reading can teach you about a topic. As our topic was how revolutions have changed over time, I thought it would be fit to explain what our poems taught me about revolutions. I guess you could call this closure. Although each and every single one of these poems is powerful, creative, and a work of art on it’s own, when you look at all of them together, they become something even greater. These texts show us a timeline. They show us how people inspired change over time. Whether it was a big scale revolution like the French or American one, or a personal revolution, these poems as a whole teach us that change and revolution is not something to be afraid of, that the only way we can make a difference now, is to look back at historical perspectives form the past and change our selves. Based on lessons we have learned as a human race in the past and how we will insert these lessons into problems now is something we can actually learn from poems like these. Anyways, I hope you guys enjoyed that little performance and that you learned about bit more about the importance of poetry and historical perspective! Ciao! Cow! How? Now! OW! never mind…. I got a bit off track with my BBBBB rhyme scheme, whoopsies!
~Jordyn
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