Shang Ya! Friendship Oath

Have your students use this ancient oath of friendship from China to write a friendship poem.



I have used this poem to inspire my class towards writing friendship poems for years, however for the past two weeks, I have had a university student from Xi'an China observing my fifth grade classroom as part of her studies. I decided to create easy to use templates for writing this poem, so that we can write the poems while she is still visiting our class. Usually, I do this for Valentine's Day, but we are doing it a bit earlier this year.

Shang Ya! Oath of Friendship Poetry Writing

Here is some examples of Friendship poems written by girls from the Mathare Valley slum in Nairobi, Kenya. On my third trip to Kenya in 2014, I taught a variety of poems for students in grades 5-12. I taught Shang Ya! to this group of girls. They also made the Chinese style artwork. I then photographed their artwork and used a green screen to record them reciting their poem in front of their art. I did a whole class in about two hours. It was very busy, but fun!

Some day I will publish the directions for making the Chinese inspired art work.

For a short time my Shang Ya! Friendship Oath: Write a Friendship Poem is half-price at Teachers Pay Teachers.

Simply a Superb Sequel: "Hate That Cat" by Sharon Creech

While strolling through Barnes and Noble this weekend, I was thrilled to see that Sharon Creech has written a sequel to my favorite children's book, "Love That Dog".

The new book, "Hate That Cat" is just as wonderful as her first book. I love these simple books as they bring together animals, poetry, teaching, and the struggles of boyhood in a very readable and entertaining way.

In "Hate That Cat" we have the same setup as the first book, we find that Miss Stretchberry moves up a grade so that she is still Jack's teacher. They still communicate through a poetry journal and Miss Stretchberry continues to use great poetry and poets (T. S. Eliot, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Edgar Allan Poe) to inspire her class.

The class learns about the sounds of poetry in this book through devices like alliteration and onomatopoeia. I was tickled to see that "The Bells" by Edgar Allen Poe was one of the featured poems. I used this poem for many years with my own class as a beginning point for writing "sound" poems and it is always fun to say the word "tintinnabulation". Seeing that it is the 200th anniversary of Edgar Allen Poe's birth this month, I will have to revisit this poem in my class. Another featured poem in this story that I always use in my class is "This is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams, as well as a return to his other wonderful poem "The Red Wheelbarrow". Although Walter Dean Myers doesn't return to visit the class, he does send letters to Jack and Jack learns that Walter Dean Myers' son, Christopher, is also a notable poet.

It is sounds that permeate this story. Besides the poetry, we are introduced to Jack's mother in this volume, and we learn about her inability to hear sounds and that becomes an important component to the story. That, and cats! The book may be titled "Hate That Cat" but Jack has his reasons. In the end the hated cat plays an important role and of course Jack falls in love with his own little kitten.

"Love That Dog" remains my favorite children's book, but "Love That Cat" will take a place right next to it on my bookshelf. I can't wait to share it with my class, and I know that I will see students rereading the book again and again just like they do after I read them "Love That Dog". I am simply thrilled that Sharon Creech wrote this second book!

Here is a teacher's guide to both books.

Here is just the first verse of:

The Bells
by Edgar Allan Poe

Hear the sledges with the bells,
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

Listen to "The Bells"

	Edgar Allen Poe - The Bells
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

This is a strange and "Poe"ishly nightmarish version of "The Bells"

	Edgar Allen Poe/Symphologic - The bells
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

If you want a great book for children to introduce them to Edgar Allen Poe then get a copy of "Poetry for Young People: Edgar Allen Poe". It has an interesting mini-biography as well as his poems and in his case poetic pieces based on some of his stories. It has short introductions to each poem, pictures, and lots of definitions for the difficult vocabulary words. There are other similar books by the publisher about other poets that I have in my classroom covering poets such as: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and William Shakespeare . I still have to purchase the poetry books of William Blake, Carl Sandburg, Lewis Carrol, Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes. These books are a great resource for both students and teachers.

The Maple Tree: Creating Videos from Student Poetry

On the first day of school this year I introduced my class to William Carlos Williams' poem "A Locust Tree in Flower". I found the poem a few years ago while using some other of his poems in my class. I found it to be an unusual and simple poem, but there was something about it that begged me to ask, "What is this?"

I decided to use it in my class as a lesson on words and how we use them, as well as a clever introduction to poetry. In subsequent lessons I use "This is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams to teach poetry form versus paragraph form and "The Red Wheelbarrow" for creating meaning from insignificant details.

This year I handed out a sheet to every student with each word from the poem printed in random order on small squares that they could cut out. I asked them to try to put these words into some kind of written form and make sense out of them. I told them they could even add words if they needed to in order to give the words some meaning. The class played around with the words for a bit and discovered what they could or couldn't do with the words.

Later I showed them the poem, "A Locust Tree in Flower.


The class now saw the words expressed in a poem, but they still had a hard time making sense out of it. I have never studied this poem or read about how William Carlos Williams created it. Maybe there is a story behind it but I just tell the class that this poem reminds me of a puzzle. Each word is like a puzzle piece and some pieces are missing and the pieces may even be out of order, but they are jumbled up together to make this poem. We try imagining which words go together and what words could be missing to help create sensible phrases. By playing around with the words the students start making some meaning as well as have a fun time with words and language.

Then we talk about why I find poetry interesting. They know writing as something that you have to do in school and where the teacher forces them to follow rules. I tell them that poets are "rebels" who like to make up their own rules. That catches a few students off guard a bit (hopefully the boys!) and I hope that they start seeing poetry as more then just writing for "sissies" and something that can be fun, creative, and a bit rebellious as well as an exercise that is more about playing with words then about "making rhymes". Who knows if this is a correct approach to poetry, but at least it makes it interesting and understandable for me.

We talk about how poets can make their own rules and come up with rules for "The Locust Tree in Flower". We decided that William Carlos Williams only put one word on every line. He had four stanzas of three words each and one last word at the end. He gave it a title and placed his words randomly so that they didn't make sense when first reading it, although we can assume that he put great thought into the choice and placement of his words

Then we went outside to observe a Maple Tree on our playground that the kids are all familiar with because it stands right next to the school's playground equipment. We went outside with clipboards and observed the tree and they wrote words and phrases about what they observed

When we came inside we wrote out own "Maple Tree" poems following Williams Carlos Williams rules for writing his poem. A simple poem may take only minutes to write

I took digital pictures while we were outside and when the students later typed the poems into a computer (for their first simple typing exercise in the computer lab) I inserted a picture of the tree on their poem so that they could print it out and show off their first writing assignment of the year

I left the project behind and moved on as the year progressed until a found the Animoto video slideshow program. Within a few minutes of seeing how this program worked I thought to myself that this poem would lend itself wonderfully to being presented with Animoto. After playing with the program a bit and seeing how it worked I tried describing to the class my vision of what we could do with their poems. We didn't have much time so I had them write out the words to their poem on paper and use "tree" colors to color them in. Rather than cut them out I had them rip out the words. Then we went outside with those who completed the task quickly enough and took photos of each word on the wood chips underneath the maple tree. I wish I had more photos of the tree without the students in the photo from the first day, but I didn't know back then that I would be doing this project. I took the photos and uploaded them to the Animoto site and arranged them very quickly into some kind of order, chose a piece of music off the Animoto site, and then let the program perfrom its magic of arranging the poems into a digital-musical slideshow.

I think the results are wonderful and each video has its own flavor and design. At some points in the videos the photos, music, and transitions are just perfect for the poem the student wrote

Take a look at the results. Don't you think these are great.

T.E.

A.N.

A.A

J.B

I.M.

S.V.

C.A.

K.S.

While I was looking up information on the poem online, I found another interesting video presentation of "The Locust Tree in Flower". This is from a museum installation by Jason Freeman of the Georgia Insitute of Technology. At his installation people can read the poem. He writes, "The installation invites a single person at a time to create and perform a musical setting of the poem by simply reading it. A short piece of music is generated in real time by applying digital processing, mixing, and looping to the user's voice.". The results are very unusual! You can view a sample recording here. It is very interesting to see the different ways a simple poem can inspire others.

This blog post has now been included in the Carnival of Education's "The Debate Issue" hosted by Eduwonkette. You can read all sorts of educational blogger's posts that have been formatted by Eduwonkette into an entry that at first looks like the presidential candidates debating policy. What a fun and creative way to present all these diverse blog entries. You can find a reference and link to this post by reading what "Sarah Palin" adds to the debate!