Reading Hard Poems with 6th Graders

The Rationale:

I am a firm believer that you can elevate any young reader just by asking more of them.

My 6th graders have just finished a unit reading a young readers edition of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. While we prepare for our Fall Exhibition (post pending the successful execution of said event), I'm doing a short 2-week long unit on poetry and food. I've selected two poems - Gary Snyder's "Steak" and Wendell Berry's "MANIFESTO: Mad Farmer's Liberation Front" - which I believe will prove challenging to the students but are well within their grasp both topically and prosodically (this may or may not be a word).

The Lesson:

Do Now: In your notes, give me 3-5 sentences answering the question, "What is poetry to you?"

After settling in and jotting down some thoughts, I went around and solicited answers from the students. Some answers which stuck with me were "songs without music" and "a tapestry of words." I immediately challenged these ideas with Snyder's "This Present Moment." This led to a livelier conversation, but alas, I was forced to return to the matter at hand.

So, I posed the question: "When faced with a difficult poem, what should you do?" With this in mind, we generated the following 11-step procedure:

A 6th Grader's Guide to Reading Difficult Poems

1. Read it!
2. Read it one more time.
3. Read it again.
4. Try to understand the first two lines
5. Think about it literally
6. Make guesses about it.
7. Try to think about how the poem relates to you.
8. Circle or underline the words and phrases that are confusing
9. Look up difficult words.
10. Try to figure out allusions*, references, etc.
11. Read it again.

*great in-situ vocabulary lesson here.

I divided the class into two groups, and had them run through their own procedure. This afternoon in our Writing Workshop we'll begin the process of explaining our personal understandings of the poems to a wider audience.

Working hard

One student's first try at annotation

Tune back later for some samples of student writing from this activity.