Digital poetry reading and teaching poetry

Melissa's demo from yesterday got me thinking more about the teaching of poetry, specifically how I can adapt pieces of her demo into what I've got going in my classroom.

I've been thinking a lot recently about the idea of "teaching" poetry.  While the "teaching as telling" method of instruction doesn't work for a lot of content, it's definitely true with poetry.  Poetry is best experienced, rather than explained or taught, so the structure of a class where the goal for students is to be readers, writers, and appreciaters of poetry, is one that has a space for students to engage in these practices.

It's always tricky, as a teacher, to create structure and direction (kind of the idea of lessons), without limitation.

This in my class, I feel like I took a step in the right direction this past year by giving students some poetry exploration space.  Like with what Melissa did in her demo, I had a lesson where students had the space to explore poetry.  The site I used was Teen Ink.  Students found some poetry they liked, bookmarked the poems, talked with classmates about what was happening in the poems and why they picked them, then moved to use one or more of these pieces as mentor texts to try out writing their own poetry.

But where Melissa's demo has got me thinking is within the capacities of technology that I already had placed in front of my students for my lesson.  That it could be used to engage students more deeply with poetry.

In her demo, we searched and read, but we also recorded readings of these poems and listen to/view /responded to the reading of others.  I was struck by how just this extra step enabled me to connect to the poem; reading it aloud gave me a feeling of ownership of the words that I wouldn't have had through just looking at the words on the page. And similarly, with being able to "experience" other poems as told through the voices of my colleagues made the poems more human...the presentations of poems better conveyed the human experience that the poetry is meant to capture.

I'm totally stealing this. Thanks Melissa.