I had a good lesson today, inspired by Dead Poet's Society. It could last anywhere from 10 minutes to a good half an hour or more.
I started by asking them if they had seen Dead Poet's Society. Many of them had. I asked them to recall a scene in which Robin William's character asks his students to go home a write a poem and them come back and read it to the class. One student doesn't and Robin Williams procedes to bring this student to the front of the class and evokes this fabulous poem out of him.
Then I asked them if poetry was useful in a conversation class because most people don't talk in poetic language in everyday life. We talked about how poetry grows out of feeling and how in order to express feeling, you have to have an advanced command of language and the more diverse your vocab is, the better you can express things, etc.
From there, we played word association (one person says a word, the next person says the first word they think of, and so on) to warm up. From there, we began creating a group poem. I started with "The waves crashed against the shore." We live in Mar del Plata near the beach, hence the sea reference. From there, we went in a circle, adding lines as I wrote exactly what they said on my computer. At the end we had a poem which I read to them. They LOVED it and were really excited about their poem (Everyone asked me to send it to them by e-mail). This activity could be modified to take up more or less time, depending on your need (creating different poems, different themes, poems from different groups). Hope your classes enjoy! :)
The poem we created is below:
Untitled
The waves crashed against the shore
The woman looked to the sea
She saw the seagull
Flying across, around... I don't know the preposition
Use the one that goes
And she was holding her son's hand
She felt peaceful
She was pondering her past
To see made her feel
Peaceful
Thinking about what to do the next day
She flung her arm's open wide
And hugged her son
And that's it.
No!
I kept on watching
As I felt the sea breeze on my face
I was dreaming
Such a wonderful view
Made me remember
My childhood
A long time ago.
