Poetry paint swatches

This post is written by fellow LNC teacher Jessie Locke, who teaches 8th grade ELA. She is a graduate of Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), is in her 18th year of teaching, and is a National Board Certified Teacher. She taught elementary school for 8 years, and has been in 8th grade since 2014. I can’t wait for my own children to have Ms. Locke one day as their teacher. Our district is so lucky to have such creative and compassionate teacher like Ms. Locke.

This lesson is ideal for middle school! At the same time, I can totally see using this same activity in my AP Literature class in Unit 2 of the Course and Exam Description.

Where it started …

In all my years of teaching, teaching poetry was the one thing that scared me more than anything. While I made sure to fit it in, I never felt really excited or engaged in what I was doing; and I never really felt like I was doing it justice.

In the fall of 2022, the ELA teachers at my school were all given a copy of Teach Living Poets written by Lindsay Illich and Melissa Alter Smith. Admittedly, it sat on my bookshelf for a few weeks. However, I kept finding myself lingering on it and developing a growing interest for what was inside, regardless of the intimidation. I finally decided to just start reading to see what would happen. Next thing I knew I was putting post-its on pages, underlining important findings, writing notes in the margin, and highlighting all the things I needed to make sure to reference later. The love of learning something new was re-ignited, and I realized that I could take some baby steps to move through my discomfort to find joy and excitement in teaching poetry.

Moving forward …

In my eagerness to learn more and incorporate this into my teaching, I found a partner in Elizabeth Jones, our Middle School Reading Specialist. I was able to wrap her in with me and schedule a time to meet with Melissa to pick the brain of someone that is not only the knower of all things #TeachLivingPoets, but an amazing teacher and co-worker that is happy to guide, share, and encourage along the way.

Meeting with Melissa pointed us in the direction of poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha and her book Water & Salt. Elizabeth Jones and I worked together to create lessons that would build students’ understanding of poetry, engage them in conversation, excite them to read more, and encourage them to interact with poetry in ways they might not have in previous years. All of these lessons took inspiration from Teach Living Poets, especially those on annotating poems, tone, and themes in poetry.

Where it is now …

Last year I was able to co-teach some with Elizabeth Jones, weaving poetry lessons throughout a reading of Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys. This year, I have taken Tuffaha’s poetry and worked solely with that for a poetry unit that focuses on reading a variety of her poems, interacting with them, analyzing them, discussing them, and even using them as mentor texts to write original poetry.

Paint Samples Lesson

This lesson came after our middle school students had already been working with the poems of Lena Khalaf Tuffaha for just over a week. They have listened to many poems, worked on annotating using the tri-color annotation activity, worked individually and in groups on analyzing poetry, discussed literary devices, and debated themes in poetry.

Before bringing in the poems for this activity, we first discussed how colors can be representative of the mood and tone in a poem. To show this, students were given a random color at their table (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple). They were instructed to list what words they associate with that color, and what they feel it represents.

Some of the examples they came up with:

Red: hate, sacrifice, strength, aggression, passion, danger, war, love, anger

Orange: energy, warning, positivity, vitality, optimism, warning,

Yellow: happiness, positivity, friendship, joy, anxiety

Green: life, growth, wealth, new beginning, nature, envy

Blue: calm, sadness, wisdom, loyalty, relaxation, serene

Purple: royalty, luxury, bravery, nobility, power

These were then discussed as a class and left hanging up at the front of the classroom. (This was adapted from the lesson on teachlivingpoets.com titled Poetry Analysis Using Color.)

After discussing color, students were first given 5 different poems that they could choose from: “Water & Salt,” “Running Orders,” “It’s Beirut Out Here,” “My Mother Returns to Her Childhood Home,” and “Linger.” Students spent time reading each poem and picking out one that they felt most connected to.

Once they decided which poem they planned to use for this project, students then did a first read of the poem, making initial annotations on their thoughts, connections, literary devices, etc. When a first read was complete, students could then come and pick out a paint sample swatch that best represented their chosen poem.

To show what they learned from the poem, students were to create a poster that described and analyzed the poem.

At the top: Students were to describe why the color they chose symbolized their chosen poem. This needed to include the title and author, along with evidence from the text that supported this color choice.

With there being 3 different sections for the paint swatch, there were three different pieces of information that needed to align with each color.

COLOR SWATCH:

A possible theme of this poem / The speaker is trying to convey …. through _____
“DIRECT LINES FROM THE POEM” that provide text evidence for the theme (complete sentences)
Thoughts / feelings response to the poem

Here is a Google Slides with directions for the activity. Please go to File –> Make a Copy if you wish to edit.