Thursday 21 June 2007

annotating poems

i tried this activity this week and it worked really well. it's quite simple really, you just get the students to annotate a poem using different colours and fonts. they can work on it independently, and it gets them to react to the poem if they think they don't have an opinion on it. you can then get them to write about their choices and this will naturally lead to a discussion and analysis of the poem.
you can then laminate the best poems and use them as wall displays. hhm that's what i could be doing at the moment, working on my wall displays. i wish i was more artsy and creative:(

anyway, here (1, 2, 3 )are some of the poems that the students produced, in my order of preference. feel free to help me judge them though, i'm always so biased and let my opinion of the student get in the way!

6 comments:

'liya said...

I've done the same thing with mine and it's really fun! It gives you the chance to sit back for awhile (and rest!) and also to read/mark something more interesting than just checking pen/pencil annotations.

Those poems look great :D

hema said...

i had nothing to do. they didn't need help with them at all. i felt a bit useless:( i walked around annoying them for a bit and then just sat down and wrote a poem!
i have a feeling the last one is the best. i like the way he makes the writing go all crazy at the end when it gets al intense. but he's so cocky, he went around saying everyones elses work was crap.
not everyone is creative!
it's a good job "real" marking is done annoymously

Caged Bird said...

oh my goodness these poems are quite what are the words im looking for.....morbid, disturbing, violent, intense. erm scary........

I used to annotate poems when i did English Lit at college. Did like English Lit. But i used to think how do we know thats what the poet meant , maybe we just reading too much into it. Apparently not supposed to take things at surface value with poems, theres a hidden meaning...... yeh right. Dog means Dog!!

hema said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
hema said...

the theme was war poetry, i wasn't deliberately being morbid!!

are you sure, maybe dog is a metaphor for something. after all, every man and his dog use metaphors.
and the poet must have worked like a dog, there's got to be something behind it.

you're a top dog, you know that:)

Atypical said...

yeh i like the last one too, i think it's the fact that everyone else has done the word like it is (i know theres a word for this i can't think of it??) you know as in blood is red or rain is blue stuff like that but the last one doesn't, it uses more font sizes and types which is interesting. I remeber we did the dolce et decorum one, then we had to write our own war based poem, mine was the best lol the teacher read it out loud and everything :) (ok not very modest but oh well)