Wyoming — Alex Millage and Emmanuel Cano put their friendship into words using a poetry technique they learned in class.
“We have been best friends for two years and we wanted to tell people that we were best friends,” Alex said. “Our teacher taught us anaphora. We thought it was cool, so we put it in our poem.”
They presented the poem, aptly titled “Best Friends,” together during the first-ever Fourth Grade Poetry Slam at Oriole Park Elementary. They used anaphora to repeat the phrase “Because we are best friends” after lines about goofing around, playing together and having a secret handshake.
The slam, performed to a chorus of snapping fingers from parents in the audience, was the culmination of a unit of poetry for which students delved into the study of poets, poetic elements, history and expression. To showcase their learning, teachers Hannah Church, Cheyenne Cooper and Sheri Adams organized the event.
‘It was cool to shift from the happy, funny poems to the more serious ones, and the fact that poetry is both.’
— teacher Hannah Church
Church said students not only learned elements of poetry and different styles, but how it is used as a means of expression and to share perspectives. They also learned about the poets, including when they lived and their stories.
“We started learning more about really common authors, Walt Whitman and Roald Dahl, Langston Hughes — all people we’ve heard about before but we didn’t really understand their stories,” Church said. “As students got to know about the poet’s backstory, they started to learn more about what makes their writing unique.”
Fourth-grader Ariel Walcott said she learned that poetry is often more than meets the eye.
“I thought poetry was something they did for fun and it didn’t mean anything, until we found out that it actually meant something and that was really cool,” she said.
Poems and Poets
In studying poems such as “Harlem” by Langston Hughes and “I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman, they learned how poems can be comedic, serious, figurative or literal.
“It was cool to shift from the happy, funny poems to the more serious ones and to learn that poetry is both,” Church said.
Several wrote their own versions of “I Hear Oriole Park Sing,” based on the Whitman poem, describing the sounds surrounding them every day at school. They also practiced acrostic and free-verse poetry.
“They started really simple,” Church said. “They always wanted to just tell their stories and make it long like a personal narrative, but as we keep going through the unit, students discovered that it’s not a story about them, it’s just expressing their emotions using different poetic devices like repetition, anaphora, metaphors and similes.”
Ariel read the poem “I Have Some Friends” by Robert William Service for the slam.
“I picked it because I thought it was about friends until I researched it. It is actually about comfort items and what makes you comfortable, so I kept it,” she said.
For Nariel Garcia-Estrada, who is from Cuba and is still learning English, reading a poem called “Furry, Furry, Squirrel” at the slam gave him a chance to show how he can read “super, super fast” in English, he said.
“For me, to read this for my family makes me happy.”
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