Meg

February Entry: Success!
My sophomores are studying Elie Wiesel's Night, his memoir of the Holocaust. As part of our unit, we have looked at the history of the Holocaust and have talked about some of the artifacts. One of the most poignant artifacts is the 7,000 kilos of hair that was found at Auschwitz. I found some pictures and a poem about the hair.



Pigtail by Tadeuz Rozewicz

When all the women in the transport had their heads shaved four workmen with brooms made of birch twigs swept up and gathered the hair

Behind clean glass the stiff hair lies of those suffocated in gas chambers there are pins and sidecombs in this hair

The hair is not shot through with light is not touched by the breeze is not touched by any hand or rain or lips

In huge chests clouds of dry hair of those suffocated and a faded plait* *plait: a braid a pigtail with a ribbon pulled at school by naughty boys.

Assignment: After looking at the pictures and reading the poem, choose one of the following prompts.

Imagine you are the young girl whose hair has been shaved off. Write a creative piece expressing her thoughts and feelings. You must use part of the poem in your piece.

Analyze the poem and pictures. Look at the language describing the hair. Symbolically, what else could the hair in the poem represent in the Holocaust. You must use part of the poem in your response.

Most students chose to do a creative project. We were amazed at some of the results, which literally brought tears to our eyes. Two are below.

Clippers (a poem by a male student)
In a dark room, A formidable shadow stands, Clippers in hand, Shaving hair off Clean heads.

His thought is bleak, His mind is haunted Courage is daunted, Taking everything from children And adults alike.

He stands in the field Holding his clippers, Shaving the hair off of The dead, off of their Innocent heads,

Taking memories of Happiness, love, And times never to come. Taking the innocence of a Beautiful girl, Who will burn Before she is to know What it means To be happy. All her life held in a plaited braid.

He is not happy, he is patient. He lives with death. He is death. With clippers, Instead of a grim scythe.

And this untitled poem, by a female student.
Today I lost pretty. It was shaved off by a strange man in a uniform, and was swept away like it meant nothing.

Today I lost pretty, And no one held my hand so I wasn't scared, Or reassured me that it would grow back.

Today I lost pretty, But I didn't lose the memory of my father's loving tousle, My mother's gentle caress, My sister's fingers weaving my morning's rat's nest into a beautiful braid for school.

Today I lost pretty, But the memories aren't gone, And that is all I have left.

Seriously. I dare you not to be moved by these.

January Entry: Success!
My AP Students have started studying Poetry. I usually start with looking at several poems as an entire class. One such poem is Pablo Neruda's "[|Ode to a Lemon]". We begin by looking at the poem and then I give them a word sort. I ask them to sort words from the poems into categories like celestial bodies, religious terms, architecture, etc. Then they need to write a paragraph explaining WHY the poet may have used those terms and what his purpose was. Examples:

1) Mr. Neruda used religious terms extensively in one of the sections in this poem. He refers to the lemon, cut in half, as a “cathedral”. This imagery is used to convey feelings of holiness about the lemon, as if the lemon is actually the nectar of the gods. Each individual lemon is to be exalted as its own personal shrine to itself; each is to have the beauty and the grace of a cathedral, with its vesicles as the shining stained-glass windows that are located in said cathedral. The alcoves further extend this metaphor. Alcoves in a cathedral are holy places of worship, and are peaceful, which is inferring that this is the kind of appearance that a lemon has.

2) Words about celestial bodies were chosen by the author because they glorify lemons, making them appear large, important, and mysterious. Also, the words make the lemons appear out of this world, because lemons are a source of food, and food was out of the author’s world, as he grew up in poverty and starvation. For example, the author says that a lemon is like “half a world on a trencher,” metaphorically comparing a lemon to a planet.

I have done this lesson in the past and it has been successful, but this year I took it a step further. I broke them into groups and then I gave another Pablo Neruda ode to each group ([|Ode to Win]e, [|Ode to Onion], [|Ode to Tomato], [|Ode to Salt], [|Ode to a Large Tuna in the Marketplace]). The groups had to read the poem, come up with the word groups and then choose one to discuss and present to the class. The students really enjoyed this activity and did a wonderful job coming up with categories and analyzing the author's purpose in the poem.

December Entry
Success!

Look like the kids at a great time doing it, always a plus. Now I want to hear them use the words in the hallway ;) - Pam

I try to connect vocabulary study to the literature unit we are working on. Currently we are reading //Macbeth//. Since I run a large competition during my //Macbeth// unit, I used this review as one of the challenges for that competition. I set up a vocabulary review based on Concentration or The Memory Game. I wrote out the words and the definitions and then I laminated them. After that I arranged them on the board.



Students worked in teams, trying to make matches. They got "points" for each match they made.







Once all the matches were made, students were asked to make sentences using their words. Those sentences had to, in some way, relate to Macbeth. They got points for all the sentences, as long as they used the word correctly //and// the sentence related to Macbeth. "Macbeth **skulked** through the castle on his way to kill Duncan." "Lady Macbeth thought that killing King Duncan would be a **panacea** for their troubles." "Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are both very **malevolent** in the play."
 * Examples**:







The students loved this activity and they felt much more comfortable using the vocabulary words while writing sentences and paragraphs for their vocabulary tests.

November Entry Success


 * While introducing concepts like imagery, metaphor and simile to my sophomores, I had them read the following poem:**

An Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry” from //The Apple that Astonished Paris.// Copyright � 1988, 1996 by Billy Collins.

I then had students choose an image from the poem to draw:

[[image:DSC04484.JPG width="480" height="340" align="left"]]








=
I thought that this lesson was very successful, even for students who just drew stick figures. It helped them to really connect with the poem and allowed them to "see" the metaphors and similes that Billy Collins used in the poem. I would definitely use this lesson again...in fact, I may use it with my seniors. One funny note...many students did not know what a color slide was (stanza 1) so I had to get out an old slide and show it to them!======

October Entry
It's NEW!

For my October entry, I worked on the first wiki and created the second wiki.