For our very last class at Price, the fourth graders took a quick Poetry Quiz to see just how much they'd learned about poetry and poems during our time together.  We then, as a class, constructed a wondrous poem all about Poetry.  This is our poem about Poetry - or Ars Poetica. 

Please enjoy our collaborative poem! 

"Ars Poetica"
4th grade class

Poetry is a girl because it will look pretty and it
will be my friend and we will go outside, it will be fun.

This lesson was all about writing a poem in response to looking at art, better known as, ekphrastic poetry.  We read a poem inspired by a painting by Edward Hopper, and read the poem Girl at Sewing Machine by Mary Leder.

We read the poem and found several poetic devices at work including repetition and simile.  It also helped us to identity how we knew the poem was all about the painting by comparing some of the details that Leder used in her poem. 

This morning we had fun looking at examples of Surreal paintings by Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali.  We talked about what was both real and unreal or magical in their paintings.  We then read an example of how a poem can have surreal qualities by reading the poem, Bird Transfer by Matthea Harvey.

For our last class in February we read a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks to celebrate the end of African American History Month.  We read the poem, to the Diaspora so we could also review poetic elements such as : repetition, metaphor and personification. 

We also tried to figure out why Brooks spelled Africa with a K.  Many of us decided she chose to spell it this way because as Poets we are allowed to be creative and use our language as an expression of who we are.

You will notice that some of these poems use some of Brooks' own lines as a starting point.

The last week of February we read and learned about the beautifully simple form of Haiku.  We read several examples of 17 syllable Haiku by such masters as: Basho, Ryusui, Takahama. In order to drum up some interesting images we poured over Highlights magazine covers and generated some wonderfully creative images for our Haiku. 

This week we concluded our lesson with Robinson Jeffers.  [Please be on the lookout for some fantastic photo collage/word poems coming soon from Price!]  For our poems we read an excerpt of Autumn Evening by Jeffers and spent some time discussing and looking at how the poem illuminated a single moment in the narrators life. 

This week we learned about the Ode, spending another week reading the poet Pablo Neruda. After reading the Ode, An Ode to Thanks we went over all the different ways that Neruda talks about the word, Thanks. We saw how Neruda created several metaphors and also used four different languages in the poem to say Thanks - (French, Russian, German and Spanish!) It was fun to see how an Ode could celebrate or honor something/someone.

Please enjoy our Ode's to various objects!

Ode to Fruit
Mikayla M.

Ode to fruit
you are sweeter
than sweet

This week we spent the day dreaming up questions we only wish we could get the answers to!

We read several of Pablo Neruda's poetic questions from his work, Book of Questions. We spent a lot of time discussing what makes a question "normal" and what makes a question "poetic." In the end, a question when asked in a poetic manner - is much more imaginative and clearly more interesting!

Enjoy some of our questions!

Jashon J.

How did the man pick up the sun?
How do you stand in mid-air?
When will the sun and the moon rise

Last week we read the poem Fairy Tale by Miroslav Holub.  We discussed how the poem is written in list form - and we spoke about how we use different lists all the time.  The poem also made us think about the idea of personification and how we can apply emotion to all sorts of things. For our list poems we made or created something and added an element of magic to the ingredients/parts of the poem!

Channicia P.
Untitled

You need brown paper
a pen on top of brown paper
an earthquake going through the paper
and then the paper is shaking.

This week we read two very different poems that both used repetition. One poem used repetition to help create an image in the poem and the other one used the device called, alliteration to help create a repetition of sound. We reviewed a common use of alliteration by talking about tongue-twisters.