Peterson's Chapter on Poetry

Of all the readings, I found Peterson's chapters on both poetry and narrative writing to be very helpful for my future teachings in the classroom. In the poetry chapter, Peterson described how poetry can be incorporated in a cross curricular manner to get students interested in the subject manner and write their feelings, opinions and knowledge on the covered topic. Poetry can be great tool to help students learn and recall important facts due to it's looser form (or format), it's use of word play and rhyming and it's appeal to artistic and creative side of each student. For instance, in social studies poetry can be used to express the two sides of a debate (or of a conflict) with the poem also physically separating these two viewpoints as seen by the example of confederacy in the black line masters pages. Students can learn science vocabulary and important facts by trying to find words that rhyme with the words they need to remember. Poetry and creative writing also allow students who are more proficient in the language and arts to think of the math and sciences in a whole new manner. Peterson expresses the importance of how poetry can be effectively used as long as students understand the format of the poem (which is teacher driven) and can include the necessary elements or facts in the poem.  An example of a way students could use story telling and poetry in science class would be a lesson a colleague and myself taught at our practicum. To learn about light pollution, we showed a video and did an activity about sea turtles and how lights from the city and beach houses confuse them with the sea and eventually kill them as they never make it to the ocean. Children love baby sea turtles and this narrative had all the students in our class hooked on the subject of light pollution and why it's important. From here we could have the students create a poem (using at least 5 scientific words that were learned in this unit) about the turtles, or even write a short story about the journey of a baby turtle making it to the ocean. Students would be very engaged in this lesson and they would efficiently learn both science and creative writing in the process.