Poetry Unit Plan

Unit Title: Teaching Poems with Hyperstudio

Grade Level: Grade 5-6

Subject/Topic: Language Arts

Key Words: Language arts, comprehension, appreciation, imagination, Hyperstudio

Time Frame: Two weeks/ four class per week/ 40 minutes per class

Number of students: 30 per class

Unit Designer: Yuhong Sun

Summary of Lesson: Teaching Poems with Hyperstudio is an interdisciplinary unit intended to provide students in Grade 5-6 with skills and knowledge of comprehension, interpretation, evaluation, and appreciation of poetry. The instruction and activities in the unit are designed to support student learning poetry with Hyperstudio.

Goals of the unit:

To know the concepts of poetry

To learn the components of poetry

To learn to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate poems

To create Hyperstudio cards to express a poem visually and audibly

Link to Content Standards:

ISTE Technology Foundation Standards for Students

• Students use technology tools to enhance learning, increase productivity, and promote creativity.
• Students use productivity tools to collaborate in constructing technology-enhanced models, and produce other creative works.
• Students use a variety of media and formats to communicate information and ideas effectively to multiple audiences.
• Students develop positive attitudes toward technology uses that support lifelong learning, collaboration, personal pursuits, and productivity.

Maine Learning Results

• Students use the skills and strategies of the reading process to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate what they have read.
• Students use reading, listening, and viewing strategies to experience, understand, and appreciate literature and culture.
• Students demonstrate an understanding of how words and images communicate.
• Students apply reading, listening, and viewing strategies to informational texts across all areas of curriculum.
• Students develop skills in oral and written presentation for one-way communication with an individual or a group.
• Students develop communication skills for direct conversation and written correspondence.
• Students cooperate with others in the group work and share with each other their point of view.

Unit Design Packet

Contents:

• Completed template pages
• Completed blueprint for performance task
• Competed blueprint for other evidence

List of materials and resources

Assessment / Evaluation (rubrics)

Resources

Text books

Handouts

Collection of books of different kinds of poetry

Software

Step One

1. Desired enduring understandings

Students will understand:

• Poetry is seeing, hearing, feeling, knowing, understanding and sharing.
• Poetry is a window to one's inner self.
• Poetry is a concise way of thinking about the world one lives in.
• Poetry is any form of art that can be made from words, or the sounds, freeing us all to make new worlds.

2. Essential questions that will guide this unit and focus teaching and learning

Is all poetry happy?

Does all poetry sing the praises of human beings?

Does poetry deal with things that make us sad, for example, death?

Can we use poetry to reflect the evils of society?

3. Key knowledge and skills that students will acquire as a result of this unit

Students will know

Key concepts of poetry

Different ways of understanding, interpreting and appreciating poetry.

Students will be able to

• Perform a choral reading based on the dictates of poems
• Create vivid pictures in their minds as the teacher reads the poems aloud
• Share and discuss their mind pictures with other students
• Draw what they see in their minds and illustrate them on Hyperstudio cards
• Choose poems that they think really connect with their lives
• Read poems aloud according to the mood of the poems
• Compose Hyperstudio cards to illustrate the poems

Perquisites for this unit:

• Basic skills of creating Hyperstudio cards.

Step Two

Evidence that will show that students understand (performance tasks)

1. Lectures on the concepts and the components of poems

Teachers introduce to students the basic concepts of poems and the components of poems. For example, what poetry is, what forms poetry has, why some poems have rhyme while others don't, whether or not poetry uses punctuation, whether poems deal with the evils of society, etc.

Students make notes and ask questions.

2. Choose poems

After the lectures, teachers bring to the classroom all the books of different kinds of poetry available and students bring the books they select from the library or their own bookshelves. Spread the books out on the desks and ask students to go around and choose a book that they would like to look at and think about.

Before exploring the poems, teachers write down the questions on the blackboard for students to think about.

• Why do they choose this book?
• Why do some poems in the books attract them more than others?
• What kind of pictures do they see in their minds when they read the poems?
• Is the poem they choose a happy one or sad one?
• What kind of mood is the poem?

Students usually like the poems that relate to their lives and experiences. So give students enough time to choose the poems they like. And also give them enough time to work alone so that they can think about the questions, feel the mood of the poems and create mind pictures while they are reading the poems.

3. Discuss poems in groups

Give students the opportunity to talk about their poems in groups. Talking about poetry is an important step in helping students experience poetry in concrete ways so that they can comprehend, interpret and appreciate the beauty of poems better.

Teachers should give students instructions of how to read and appreciate poems. For example, help students pay attention to words - how words are used, how many ways can words be put together to make connections, how the same word can mean different things in different contexts and how words can be put in a certain way to achieve rhymes. Besides these, teachers should also tell students to look beyond the words, the lines and the poetry books in order to let their imaginations soaring freely while they are reading the poems because poetry is not just the art of words but also the art of impressions, sounds and imaginations.

4. Read aloud:

Reading poems aloud is another important step in helping students fully understand poetry. There is a saying that poems are meant to be read aloud. There are two ways of reading poems aloud: Choral reading and solo reading.

For choral reading students are encouraged to join groups according to their common interest. Before students do a choral reading, teachers should teach them how to read poems chorally according to the dictates of the poem, for example, what kind of voices should they use: soft, load, male or female. Teachers should also ask students to pay attention to the mood of the poem, for example, should it be gloomy and slow, light and cheerful, and fast and funny, etc.

For solo reading, besides asking students to pay attention to the dictates and the mood of the poems teachers should tell students to use natural voice, neither monotonous nor overdramatic and read smoothly and emotionally.

5. Create Hyperstudio cards

The final step in helping students have a better understanding of the poems is to ask them to create Hyperstudio cards. This is the comprehensive method to illustrate students' comprehension, interpretation, evaluation and appreciation of the poems. The cards should be the representations of the images formed in their minds when they listen to the poems and the mood that echoed in their hearts when they read the poems. While creating the cards, students are encouraged to look for the pictures on the Internet to match the contents and look for suitable music to represent the mood of the poems. After they finish the cards, they share them with their peers in class.

Other evidence that show students understand

Group work and justification on explaining and interpreting the poems.

Teachers observing students' process of choosing poems, making notes while listening to students' conversations in group activities and keeping track of making Hyperstutio cards and presentations

Student self-assessment

Self-reflection identifying learning and confusion

Performance task blueprint

Desired understanding/ content standards that will be assessed through the tasks

Knowledge

Understand and express the concepts of poems

Understand and express the components of poems

Understanding

Express clearly their comprehension, interpretation and appreciation of certain poems

Purpose of the assessment task?

Summative

Student products/performances that will provide evidence of desired understandings?

Hyperstudio cards to illustrate their understanding of the poems

Criteria that will evaluate student products/performances

Clear description of the concepts and the components of the poems

Justification of comprehension and interpretations of poems

Type of scoring tools that will be used for evaluation

Rubric (See Rubric)

Reference:

http://www.btinternet.com/~alexandergrant/quotes/pindex.htm

Best selected poems

http://www.eserver.org/poetry/

CUM Poetry Index / Canonical Verse

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozlit/poet0000.html

Ozlit Poetry

These pages are designed to show off samples of poetry by our Australian poets

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/indexauthors.html

An index of poets in representative poetry on-line

http://members.tripod.com/the_yellow_jester/makers/index.html

PBC Poetry Makers Pages

http://www.cjspoetry.com/

CJ personalized inspirational poetry gifts

http://www.poets.ca/pshstore/sidebar/sidewhatispoetry.htm

What is poetry, actually?

http://www.ceap.wcu.edu/Broughton/Poetryunit.html#Intentions

Poetry reflection

http://www.discover.tased.edu.au/english/hugo.htm#whatis

Teaching Poetry /A Forum for Teachers

http://students.itec.sfsu.edu/itec815_s99/jnaas/rubric.html

Rubric for poetry

http://volweb.utk.edu/Schools/bedford/harrisms/poetry1.htm

Poetry Rubric

http://memorial.sandi.net/LESSONS/WWII/WWIIunit/HyperStudiorubric.html

Hyperstudio Rubric

http://projects.edtech.sandi.net/pbelem/kelpforest35/hyperstudio.html

Rubric for Understanding Poems

Category	Outstanding Achievement / A	Adequate Achievement /B	Some Effort /C	No Effort /D
Planning, Justification and Development: The "Pitch"	Fully answered why you choose this poem or precisely how you intend to pitch it. You showed complete creativity, sensitivity and insight to the poem.	Almost answered why you choose this poem. You showed some significant creativity, understanding or insight to the poem. Somewhat good pitch.	Some explanation of why the poem was chosen. Do not show significant creativity, understanding or insight to the poem. Poorly worded or inarticulate pitch.	Either no plan or an extremely underdeveloped plan: almost not answered why you choose this poem. Pitch is inadequate or missing.
Understanding of Poem	Clear interpretation of the poem. You hit all the main things that are important about the poem. You demonstrate a new and insightful reading of the poem. Your understanding of the context is clear.	Interpretation of poem is somewhat good or to the point. Most theme, image, or poetic tool are noticed. Poem’s context is clear but partially elaborated.	Little explanation of the poem. Incomplete interpretation of the poem chosen. "What is context?"	No effort is made to understand the poem, and no explanation is given of the poem.
Imagery and Illustration	Almost all of the images are appropriate. There is a great sense of coherence and a good sensitivity to the poem. The images illustrate and add to the viewer’s understanding of the poem.	Most images are appropriate, but there is moderate randomness here and there, or the poem's images and the storyboard images are nearly the same, with little to no "value added."	Images seem inappropriate or randomly chosen; they do not tie in well with the poem, or the poem’s images and the storyboard images are exactly the same, with no "value added."	Storyboard is nonexistent or incomplete.
Overall Creativity or "Voice"	Very good to outstanding sense of your own creative “voice”. Perhaps you actually made a fully realized project.	Moderate to good sense of creative “voice” in your explication and/or your storyboard.	Little to no sense of creative "voice" in your explication or storyboard.	Severe to total lack of creativity /originality.
Hyperstudio Technology	Appropriate use of fonts and font size. Graphics and color are used effectively to enhance the contents of the poems. All buttons move to designated cards with an effect.	Appropriate use of fonts and font size. Graphics and color are almost effectively used. All buttons can move to designated cards with an effect.	Inappropriate font choice or font size detracts from overall message. Graphics and color used not so effectively used. Not all buttons move to designated cards with an effect.	Inappropriate font choice or font size detracts from overall message. Only imported graphics are used in project.