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.

We Got the Beat: Fibonacci Poems Part 1

National Poetry Month is over, but I am still teaching poetry.

The third graders at Northfield E. S. were blown away by Fibonacci poems. We were actually doing math, science and poetry at the same time. This was a great lesson for our first workshop together. Our main goals were counting beats and sticking to a theme -- plenty for the third graders to handle.

I'll post the first half of my Fib lesson today with some student poems. We'll do the second half of the lesson for Poetry Friday.

For several years, I've been using Robert Bly's poem "Conversation with a Mouse" as a first day elementary school warm-up. The poem is in the anthology Poetry Speaks to Children.

 

I use "Conversation with a Mouse" it to talk about how a poem can grow or travel in just a few short lines. Bly's poem begins with a mouse in its tiny nest. (I always have the children sit on the floor. It's a cozy poem, and sitting close together helps them appreciate the poem's tone.) By the concluding lines, Bly has taken us all the way to the Milky Way galaxy.

A Conversation With a Mouse

by Robert Bly

One day a mouse called to me from his curly nest:
"How do you sleep? I love curliness."
"Well, I like to be stretched out. I like my bones to be
All lined up. I like to see my toes way off over there."

"I suppose that's one way," the mouse said,
"but I don't like it.
The planets don't act that way, nor the Milky Way."

Read the rest of the poem here.

 

"Conversation with a Mouse" was a particularly good way to start a lesson on Fibonacci poems. I read the poem and we discussed its meaning. The children and I talked about the shape the Milky Way galaxy makes -- even shaping a double spiral with our hands. I asked them to remember the spiral shape. We'd be seeing it later in the workshop.

After the children returned to their desks, we looked at the science picture book Growing Patterns by Sarah C. Campbell. (Here is the author talking about the book.)

Growing Patterns explains the Fibonacci sequence in simple terms. The basics are: start with the number zero. The next number in the sequence is one. From this point, always add the two previous numbers to figure out the next number in the sequence.

0

1

(0+1=) 1

(1+1=) 2

(1+2=) 3

(2+3=) 5

(3+5=) 8

(5+8=) 13

and so on.

This sequence is seen frequently in nature, particularly in shapes like hurricanes, nautilus shells, and spiral galaxies (remember the Milky Way from "Conversation with a Mouse?") When I show the children a graphic of the Fibonacci spiral and then we look at a nautilus shell, I can see the brains lighting up!

"So," I ask the class, "can you predict how we are going to make a poem out of this pattern of numbers?" They quickly figure it out ... by counting syllables.

Tomorrow (second part of the workshop), we'll talk about the inventor of Fibonacci poems and read sample fibs.

For now, here are some Fibonacci poems by the Northfield third graders. I asked the children to aim for a science theme. Thank you to Northfield's staff and families for giving me permission to share these wonderful poems.

Storm Fib

by Stefan C.

rain (1)

storm (1)

lightning (2)

brightest bolt (3)

gigantic red flame (5)

animals running from big fire (8)

dangerous flame burning down a big brown and green tree (13)

Mars Fib

by Zachary D.

Mars (1)

red (1)

in space (2)

cold at night (3)

flying to this place (5)

darkness and stars surrounding it (8)

Moon Fib

by Brynn L.

Moon (1)

rock (1)

shining (2)

has craters (3)

smiling down at me (5)

crescent making the sky light up (8)

universetoday.com

I was at the USA Science & Engineering Festival this Saturday. There, I ran into some super mathematicians from The Association of Women in Mathematics. What were they teaching kids at the festival about? Fibonacci numbers. They were so excited when I told them about our poetry workshop. Of course, math is a language we use to describe the world around us, just as we do in poetry. 

You can check out the AWM website for some kid-friendly math worksheets. Then come back for the rest of the lesson and more Northfield poems tomorrow.