Poetry Friday: You're Doing Math in Poetry?

Welcome, Northfield Elementary School poets! It's Poetry Friday!

This week's host is Liz at Growing Wild, and that's no Fib.
Stop by for more poetry links from around the Kidlitosphere.

This week, I began one of my favorite annual poetry residencies at Northfield E.S. I have leading poetry workshops in the third grade for seven years. Maybe eight. The teachers and I lost count.

What's new this year? The Common Core curriculum has come to Maryland and classroom teachers are adjusting to the new standards. I've heard -- and observed with my own 7th grader -- the good, the bad and the ugly of the Common Core.

 

One element that people are shaking their heads about: writing in math. In middle school, it looks like a three paragraph essay explaining how you solved a problem.

In my poetry classes, it looks like this:

A mathematical graph of the Fibonacci sequence PLUS

science (Fibonacci spirals in nature) EQUALS

poetry?

The Northfield third graders are a brainy bunch. They quickly saw that we could take the Fibonacci numbers and use them to count syllables, creating a poem that matches the numerical sequence.

 

To read my full Fibonacci Poetry lesson plan, please visit last year's FIB POST. Also, check out Poetry Friday blogger and Fib inventor Greg Pincus's explanation of the form.

 

Common Core is doable... when you give teachers some flexibility to be creative and teach. The Northfield poets deftly wrote POEMS about SCIENCE using a MATHEMATICAL sequence. Let's give them some snaps. (We don't clap in poetry class. Snaps put us in a rhythmic mood.)

 

Here are two poets from Ms. Pruitt's homeroom, and their super, scientific, sequential Fibonacci poems.

Ally K.

Bees

smell

nectar

flowers

buzzing when they fly

sense of responsibility

www.texasbees.com

I found Ally's last line to be fascinating. Bees are following their instincts when they collect pollen. Yet, their behavior is responsible for the health of the plants they pollinate.

Another Pruitt poet took a favorite subject, orangutans, and went all the way to 34 syllables with his scientific information about the primates.

 

Teddy J.

Look!

Wow!

In the

treetops there

are orangutans

swinging from vine to vine. Then they

jump around to the ground to scoop up durians. They

then climb back up to the tops of the trees to make a leafy nest to sleep in, but the

baby one doesn’t want to go to sleep. The mama orangutan sings her little one a song and

     he goes to sleep. Good night, “forest people!”

www.primates.com

Originally, Teddy wrote "scoop up yummy fruit" in line 7. But he knew so much about orangutans -- I had a feeling he might know the name of this primate's favorite fruit. Sure enough, he did, and "durians" was the perfect number of syllables for the line.

Durian fruit from hungrytravels.com

I'll be blogging about our poetry workshops for the next several weeks. Thanks to the teachers and families at Northfield for inviting me to visit again this year, and for giving me permission to share their talented third graders' amazing poems.