Happy March ELA Matters! March 1st means that March Madness is around the corner on the court as well as in my classroom.
Our current focus on ELA Matters is to share ideas around writing skills. So this week, I am sharing how I engage students in reading poetry and practicing their analysis and writing skills using the acronym SOAPTSTone and a poetry bracket, NCAA basketball style!
Many students worry about understanding poems or are terrified they will need to stand up and read a poem they wrote when creating writing is not their “thing.” With our focus on analysis and a bit of a game, students begin to engage more and not only write about poetry but also talk about poetry together. The further we move into the bracket, the more we hear students talking in the hallway about the poems! A teachers dream!
For the second year, we will be working through a March Madness Poetry Bracket that is based on this NCTE blog post. Last year, my co-teacher and I used this as a starting place and have adjusted it further to match the needs of our current freshmen class.
We start by assigning each section of our 9th-grade classes to a “region”: East, West, Midwest, or South. We also take some time to review poetry terms and introduce the concept of a bracket-style competition.
On our first bracket day, we introduce the concept of “speaker” and practice with the two poems. Then, students vote on a Google Form and explain why the poem they choose exemplifies the use of “speaker” best. We do this with each skill and this is how the bracket moves along each class.
After working through each skill, we make it to the final four and semi-finals. At this point, students begin working through the step of using multiple elements of SOAPSTone together to analyze a poem. In addition, they begin to see some poems from one of the competing regions. The Championship round is where we work as a class to write an essay and model the process they will soon go through on their own.
Our final step in the unit is for students to choose ANY poem from the any region and they write an essay analyzing the poem using SOAPSTone. They have moved away from voting and into choosing a poem based on their interest and showing their skills in a full essay. We ask them to choose a minimum of three elements of SOAPSTone that best exemplify their poem’s strengths.
In the end, we have freshmen completing analysis essays on poems of their choice with a set of tools that they will be able to use throughout their high school career in both English and History!
Quick Tip: Kobe Bryant’s poem (Midwest, first pairing) is great but students got stuck on it because it was Kobe Bryant and who doesn’t think Kobe Bryant’s poem shouldn’t make it to the end? But, it took away from the skill practice of our freshmen. This year we switched it out to be a poem we use to review poetry terms and then replaced it with something else. My biggest recommendation if you use this idea is to take some time to adjust the poetry choices to your students. Take a look at how my co-teacher and I adjusted the bracket to meet our student’s needs.
