Third Graders aren’t the only ones required to write poetry. My 6th grader Carson needed to write an ode. He waited and waited and waited until the due date was on top of him, and his mother was ready to squish him like a bug. The time was now, and the options were limited. We were doomed.
So, after some Googling and finding out the rhyme-pattern for Odes, I set him to work on my Secret Poetry Writing Strategy. (Just in case you are needing to write an Ode – a popular rhyme-pattern is ABABCDECDE….)
He had to choose a person to write about….. I gave him COUNTLESS suggestions (friends, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, neighbors, coaches, teachers, his sister, his dad…..) But of course… he chose me. Lovely.
Step One: Generate a List (See, 3rd Graders?). He wrote a list of words that came to mind when he thought of me. He came up with words like teacher, kind, truthful, fourty-two, busy, smiling, happy, nice, school, smart, laugh and funny (yes, he said funny).
Step Two: Generate Rhymes. He used an online rhyming dictionary to find several rhymes for each word. We were cracking up because smart rhymed with Pie Chart and laugh rhymed with Bar Graph. If I were writing the Ode, I would have been all over that, and would have gone as far to find a rhyme for geek….. seek? weak, peek, freak, beak, leak, meek?? Hmmmm…. perhaps it’s better that he wrote it.
Step Three: Create Rhyming pairs that make sense. Just because two words rhyme, doesn’t mean they need to go together. Laugh and giraffe rhyme, but might not have fit the theme…
Step Four: Fill in the lines of the Ode pattern. That was it! A little tweaking of the rhythm (is there a rhythm?) and you’ll see his Ode fits the rhyme pattern above. You’ll also see that he had a bit of fun with his assignment AND his mom.
Feel free to write your own Ode and post it here – I’ll include it on the blog!
Ode to Mom…
My mom is not so cool
but she likes to smile.
She can really rock a school
she has a lot of style.
My mom thinks she is funny
but if I am being truthful?
She can’t be funny, she’s 42!
She’s old, but her face is sunny
she repeats her jokes, but they’re not useful.
Her jokes to me are deja-vu.