Last week I introduced my Year 9 students to our new Protest Poetry project. Below is the project outline for you to see what’s involved in the project.
We has a SUPER fun ‘hook’ lesson that involved the students watching the hilarious Rik Mayall vids below and then working in their teams to write and perform their own People’s Poet style performance poem based on a given topic. The topics were silly things like chocolate, summer and babies. The poems were AWESOME – it’s so beautiful watching kids be creative. Below are the videos we watched:
The next lesson we watched another performance poet (Anis Mogjani – Shake The Dust) – one with a VERY different style. We then got into the campfire learning space and discussed the similarities and differences between the styles of the two poets. The kids had great responses and were really engaged in this discussion! Here’s the poet we watched:
I then handed out the project outline (see above) and then had them fill out the K and W columns of a KWL chart based on the first product. For example, students might ‘know’ that poetry is a form of literature or they may ‘wonder’ how long the poem needs to be. I refused to answer questions, preferring to direct the students to complete the chart with their questions. These will form the basis of the ‘investigation’ stage of this project. For homework students had to register for edmodo, join our group and post up links to three protest songs they know.
Check my next post to read about my plans for tomorrow’s lesson. Hope it goes as well as last week’s lessons!!
[Thanks to the twitter colleague who suggested these two poets for my hook lesson - I couldn't find your name - sorry!]
Love the assignment and the examples!