“Upside Downside Inside Out” captured the attention of Twillman Elementary second grade students. The Springboard program allows students to experience movement, pattern and repetition with poetry. They read and listened to poems and created original poems with the help of visiting author and poet Amy Gage.
To prepare the students in Sharene Brown’s class, Gage and Brown read poems from other authors to help the students see and hear rhythms and patterns contained in the words. Children learned that not all poems rhyme and they learned vocabulary terms such as alliteration, mood, metaphor, stanza, rhythms, onomatopoeia (real or made-up words that mimic sounds) and surprise endings.
“Students are so engaged,” said Brown. “They can’t wait for the next lesson and are applying the new skills in their writing already.”
Gage told the students that her own children provide her with a constant source of ideas. She displayed a poem called “Just Plain,” inspired by her daughter when she was 6 years old and a very picky eater. Gage read it aloud first while alternately clapping and stomping out the rhythm, then she had the students read, clap and stomp with her.
“Poems have a heart just like you,” Gage told the students.
She said a visit to another elementary school yielded the next poem, “Gonna Do.” Students talked about their grandparents, which became a conversation about things students like to do with their grandfathers. Gage turned those conversations into a poem. Again, she read the poem first, and then asked the students to recite it with her as she rapped a pair of wooden cylinders together to express the rhythm.
Next, she led the students in creating their own poems. Gage decided they should make hello/goodbye poems, where they say goodbye to certain items then greet other things. They brainstormed as a group on topics. Gage decided to use winter and spring. She asked the students to name smells, sights and sounds of both seasons and after compiling word lists, they started poem-building, line-by-line to a pattern, for example, “Goodbye big snow coat/Goodbye Christmas tree.”
Gage co-authored the books, “Upside Downside Inside Out: Poems About Being a Kid,” and “Big News, Straight from the Heart.” She has created original poetry at more than 100 St. Louis area school led many educator workshops.