By Mary Aalgaard
Poetry Café I
n Guy Kelm’s second grade class at Riverside, students demonstrate their learning during Poetry Café. Once a month parents are invited into the classroom where students’ artwork decorates the room. Students craft bags, posters and creatures to go with the theme. Even the tablecloths and placemats are designed and colored by the students. For a bug theme last May, students served nectar punch and fruit and veggie kabobs, stuck into a halved melon or rutabaga to look like a bug. The decorations and the food were a feast for the eye and the tummy. Students recited or read their poetry in a large group, in small groups, in pairs, or as a solo act, with confidence and poise. Every child was easy to hear and understand, performing with great eye contact and stage presence. Parents sat mesmerized at the edge of their seat,
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We Are 181 • Fall 2012
a few admitting they didn’t have as much confidence in front of a group as their child. Kelm uses poetry as his primary tool for teaching the second grade curriculum. It works for him and his students because he’s a writer, a poet, a performer and a lover of words. The students see that writing is about everything. A poem can be written about any subject ever studied. They learn how to research the topic to get the details for their poems. They look at pictures and handle the material to know what it looks and feels like to be part of an ecosystem, like plants and bugs, or what it was like to live in a certain time in history. Dinosaurs are a favorite theme including science, history, research, archeology, the earth’s crust and the definition of omnivore and herbivore. Students get excited about learning.
They take the material and apply it to other areas, then bring it to life in their own way through their writing and reading of poetry. Planning the menu is all about math — estimating how many people will be there and how much food to prepare. Students need to read a recipe, which has measurements. They do some sorting and categorizing, adding, subtracting and dividing. How many people can sit at one table? How much food needs to be on that table? How many sets of plates, napkins, etc. do we need? They’re creative with what they serve and how to make it look like the theme, as in the bug-like kabobs from May, or the googly-eye punch for the October theme. They added blobs of sherbet to the green punch and called it “swamp water.” In addition to all the research and writing, party planning and preparation,
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