Amok in Tanka

If there's one thing third graders know how to do, it's fill the paper edge to edge.

That presents a challenge when we're writing poetry. The stillness, pause and "wait for it" drama you can create with a poetic line and line breaks -- not their natural skill set.


This week, we're trying Tanka. If you'd like to learn more about this ancient Japanese form, visit the Tanka Society of America. The form is popular with poets who favor the spareness of haiku, but want to extend beyond that moment-in-time image into metaphor or emotion.

My first attempt didn't go so well. The concept of five lines was difficult for some children to grasp, so the poems looked paragraphs.

I put my teaching cap on and created a frame. The new lesson works like this:

The children are in small groups of two or three (cooperative learning warm-up). I put a word up on the board: SNOW. We brainstorm all of the associations, feelings and images we can think of. No editing allowed! If I say "monster trucks," it goes on the brainstorming. Maybe my family goes to see the monster truck show every winter.

Next I give each group a word: bird, grass, shell, moon. They do the brainstorming activity on their own. We might share a few with the class after five minutes.

We spend about 15 minutes reading and discussing sample tanka. We try counting syllables, although I tell them the syllables needn't be exact. I explain the upper and lower poem -- a challenging concept that we can continue to work on in later drafts.

And here is the tanka frame, with a student's brainstorming and initial poem filled in.

Much better! I love how this student captures the mixed emotions a powerful animal can give us. Check back for more third grade tanka tomorrow. There is a lesson on teaching students how to create line breaks here.

Amok in Third Grade, Day 5

When it’s Revision Day with elementary schoolers, I loan every student a pair of re-vision sunglasses. We’re going to look at our poems again, pretending we've never seen them before. I’m learning, too. During last year's residency at Norwood, I tried to cram everything in on Revision Day. “Did you use any onomatopoeia? What about a simile? If you’re changing ideas, remember to leave a space to show a new stanza.” The kids were overwhelmed. I realized that elementary schoolers can tackle one thing during this lesson. Most important to me and their teachers: making their poems look like poems. Sounds simple, right? Not when your teacher has been telling you “fill the paper” with writing for three months. Not when you’ve written (horrid shudder) dozens of BCRs before your 9th birthday, faithfully filling up those little lined boxes with topic sentence, supporting details, and explaining how the text relates to yourself. Their first drafts tend to look like a blob of words. If the paper runs out on the word “a” – that’s the end of the poetic line. Choosing *not* to write to the very edge of the paper is a big hurdle for third graders. Here’s how we take the leap: 1. I borrow a very blobby first draft from a student and put it on the document display. (If the school only has overheads, I arrange with the student and teacher in advance to make an overhead copy.) 2. The whole class goes through the poem phrase by phrase. I mark a back-slash every time we see a new idea or feel we should start a new line. I explain that the / mark is a poet’s symbol for “new idea, skip down!, start a new line” and that this draft is like a map for our rewrite. Some students get this right away and are excited to contribute. They see where the lines breaks should go. However, the class poet has the last word. 3. If we see simple errors like spelling, punctuation and dropped words, we fix them. 4. I get fresh paper (best to have the same kind the students use) and rewrite the first several lines. Now the poem is beginning to look like a poem! 5. The teacher and I walk around the room. Some kids will recopy their poems, writing to the end of the line, dutifully copying the slash marks onto the new draft. We explain and start again. 6. Throughout the workshop, I am putting work on display. If Josh is getting the hang of line breaks, I’ll show the whole class his rough draft with the “skip down” symbols, then his new draft. It looks like a poem. What an exhilarating moment that is for young kids (and their teachers). Sometimes, the children even see how a poetic line emphasizes words and ideas, making them more powerful. Whew! That was hard, important work. The students are beginning to absorb the idea that poetry is a different type of writing, with special rules that set it apart. By now, I'm glad that we've planned a fun lesson for the last workshop. More on that tomorrow.