Linking Our Mini Lessons to Image Grammar

We have been doing these mini-lessons in class recently. I have honestly enjoyed doing mine, and taking what others have to offer from theirs. I like the idea of doing such short lessons within our classroom time. It does have its down side though. I hate when the students who are trying to create these elaborate lessons must be cut short. Of course it would be ideal to give us all much more time, however we aren't given that luxury by only having class once a week. Anyway, back to Image Grammar. Many of us have been given the lessons that we are supposed to take right out of this book by Noden. Many of these particular lessons come right out of the book. The fictional lesson was one of my favorites. We took fictional writing but placed our own spin on it. Noden's book is filled with a lot of strategies that will help us as future educators. One of my favorite strategies is on page 90. It's called "Read a Scripted Fantasy."

This strategy allows students to close their mind and really try to get a grasp on items that they are going to be writing a poem on. The best thing about it though is in the beginning the students have no clue what they are doing this for. They simply are told to think of a machine and an animal. I like that afterward there is a set of steps that the students are supposed to follow. I like it because although it is a very organized strategy, it leaves enough independence to the students to create their own kind of poem. Creating poetry actually is one of my favorite things to do with students.

Poetry allows us to write whatever we want to write, and it really can't be a "bad/wrong" piece of writing. We are given the option to rhyme or not, make it long or short and we can choose whether to have it make sense or only be understood by us. The ability we have in poetry is endless. I think that is a message that Noden is trying to relay to us in his book that our possibilities as teachers are endless. He gives us strategy after strategy that we can use in our classroom. He also gives us topics and scenarios that would allow us to think outside of the box as a teacher. Many times we ask this of our students but we never do it ourselves. Below is a video of an alternative form of "poetry." These kinds of ideas and ways of "performing/creating" poetry are alternative ways we can help encourage our students to participate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdta43fVmes&playnext=1&list=PL1C2B0C673BAC96EC&index=9