After a busy week of finals you hopefully had a fun and relaxing weekend with no school work.
Now it's time to reload for your last lap - the final few months of school (just 4 left!) - your last semester of high school - second semester of senior year. Woohoo!
We'll gat a chance to talk about your finals and grades a bit today while you are taking the first steps towards a project for the next week - Poetry Out Loud.
Perhaps you've done this with another class, and maybe not. Basically you are going to choose a poem, memorize it, figure out a great way to present it to the class, and then share it as part of a class competition. Our winner will go on to the school-wide level, where the winner and runner-up will move on to the regional level. In recent years DHS students have reached the state level and even came in second place!
Why memorize and recite poems?
- Poetry offers mastery of language, and stocks the mind with images and ideas in unforgettable words and phrases
- Poetry trains and develops our emotional intelligence
- Poetry reminds us that language is holistic—that how something is said is part of what is being said, with the literal meaning of words only part of their whole meaning, which is also carried by tone of voice, inflection, rhythm
- Poetry lets us see the world through other eyes, and equips us imaginatively and spiritually to face the joys and challenges of our lives.
Let's get started! Here's the plan for today:
- Go here: http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poems-and-performance/
- You're going to be browsing through poems and selecting three you might want to memorize and perform. Be sure you are happy with all three - I'll ultimately be choosing which one you'll work with for this project.
- Where to start? Read through this list of tips for how to choose a poem.
- By the end of the period you need to create a Google doc and share it with me. It in, you need to list the three poems you'd be interested in using. For each one, please provide a sentence or two about why it is interesting to you.
We'll talk more about the rest of it tomorrow!
