Mapping Poetry
By Sharon Daly
The first three months of school have flown by and I find myself wondering how it could possibly be December! I feel a bit like a tightrope walker trying to balance the wonderful C3WP argumentative writing work I have begun this year and still find time to focus on my TIWI theme of incorporating poetry into as many activities as I can to assess student’s learning.
The argumentative writing units that have been completed with my group of 5th grade advanced learners were very successful and engaging. But I am always stymied in getting as much accomplished as I would like due to time constraints. I have them for 20 minutes, four days a week. It seems that we just get started each day and I have to let them go.
Recently, we took a break from C3WP units and switched back to fiction. My students are reading Catch You Later, Traitor by Avi and pairing it with non-fiction resources about the Cold War era. They find the history fascinating and we have had great discussions. We have tied elements of argumentative writing into thinking about the story and differing points of view. I began to consider ways that I could infuse poetry into assessing their understanding on this unit.
Last year I found some amazing sites that linked subject area content with poetry. There is an interactive Periodic Table of the Elements in haiku and a distillation of a 200-page climate change report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) done in 27 haiku by a scientist named Gregory Johnson. A few days ago, I stumbled on an amazing site that takes information from an app called OpenStreetMap and turns a location into a haiku type poem related to that specific point. Hover over it and voila!…a poem pops up. They are fun to analyze (not all of them are good-some are amazing) and students can also craft their own.
I considered the many possibilities in connecting this resource with Avi’s book. The setting is Brooklyn, a geographic area that the students are not at all familiar with. I decided we could locate specific streets in the area using Google Maps and OpenStreet Map and explore the haiku that matches the location. Then I am directing them to write their own. We tried it with places in Wisconsin and the students think it’s funny that many of the WI locations say, “Nothing much around here.” Hovering over the map of Wisconsin, a spot in Poynette yielded this:
That’s how it is in Wisconsin
Sad morning
Cold Bites
Maneuvering through this site has generated engagement from the students for sure. It is a novel way to create poetry and I can think of many applications for it. I am thinking what a great project it would be to “haiku map” their town later this year. The historical museum would love it! The website gives a lot of technical information on how the enormous database works and how the poems are created. But for non-techies, suffice to say that it is very easy to navigate, from London to Green Bay and all parts in between. https://satellitestud.io/blog/post/openstreetmap-haiku/
I am looking forward to my students taking important moments in the novel and shining a laser lens on them to come up with some inspired poems. One wrote about how the main character was feeling:
My thoughts are like quicksand
Every time you try to get through
You just sink deeper
I await additional responses!
Additional sources for haiku in subject areas:
Periodic Table Haiku
https://vis.sciencemag.org/chemhaiku/
Chemistry Haiku
http://www.chem.ucla.edu/~harding/haiku.html
Napa California High School- History and haiku of the Roaring Twenties
http://aufdenspring.com/stuhaik.html
Article in the Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2019 Topics on science and haikus
https://www.wsj.com/articles/haikus-about-space-make-science-less-tedious-so-hope-scientists-11553527816
