**** ETNI on the web http://www.etni.org.il http://www.etni.org **** Greeeting colleagues, I liked the poem Judy Freedman sent in, and have also been thinking about using poems. I'm thinking particularly of my weakish 7th and 8th grade classes, and 1 point class in high school, who will as yet most probably have no books ? and of course there are budgetary restrictions on supplying pages of duplicated materials. So I have decided to try some poems in simple language, using the blackboard. Here they are. I (Theme: A slightly tongue in cheek look at how we feel about school and why we should be most happy to be back.) BACK TO SCHOOL By Ben Sommer We?re back in school. Oh what fun! Here we are, everyone. We sit here in class again, nice young women and nice young men. We want to learn. We want to know. Teacher help us learn and grow. We want to sit and learn all day. We do not want to go away. We had too much holiday. We want to come to school and stay! Give us homework! A quiz! A test! These are the things that we like best! We do not want to stop and rest! We lazed for 8 weeks, now we say! Enough, enough of holiday!! II Theme: Our minds range far afield when we are asleep. Where do we go? There are the dreams when we feel we are flying and soaring over all, dreams when we go over past incidents and revisit old friends and dreams when we meet famous people?. sometimes we remember bits of these, but often not. This may be elicited from the students in discussion prior to the presentation of the poem. I would do this longish poem in two halves. NIGHT TRAVELS by Ben Sommer Who knows, who knows just where we go when we go to sleep? Our bodies are here, That is clear, But do we just count sheep? Or are we in some strange, far place? Do we meet dragons face to face, or maybe fly past purple seas, or great red fires, or great green trees? Yes, while our bodies lie in beds, are we there inside our heads? Do we fight old fights again with teachers, parents, scary men, with brothers, sisters, old girlfriends? Do we fight monsters, remember school, or funny times we played the fool? Do we remember friends from our past who we see in dreams at last? Or do we talk with movie stars and dance with them at pools, or bars, or drive around in big, fast cars? When we sleep we fly away. Where do we go? Who can say? These poems provide short simple sentences, broken up visually to fit into the stanzas. Hopefully they will enable vocabulary, and grammar, revision, discussion, oral practice, repeated readings of the text and writing practice. I plan to first go over the vocabulary. Then I will write a verse on the board, and read it out. Next I?ll invite volunteers to have a go at reading it out loud, and follow this with some discussion of the meaning - and so on with the rest of the verses. Once the whole poem is on the board I will rub out the selected vocabulary words (remember we have already gone over vocabulary so they will have these items listed in their notebooks). I will then ask them to copy the poems into their notebooks and complete the missing words. Once this is done we can go over the answers, thus reading the text yet again? Homework can be learning the words, learning a verse off by heart and so forth. Better students could prepare two sentences of opinion about the poem,(or perhaps add two lines or a verse.) If you use these in class, I would be most interested to know what you did and how they went. Ben Sommer --------------------------------- ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun! ##### To send a message to the ETNI list email: etni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ##### ##### Send queries and questions to: ask@xxxxxxxx #####