whimsy thrown in. In addition, the poetry has a very musical
partners spent a class session using the process of reciprocal
quality. Each poem is devoted to a different insect, and many of
teaching to better comprehend their poem. There were many
the poems evoke the sound of that insect.
words they needed to clarify for pronunciation and meaning to
express their poem correctly.
As a language arts teacher, my goal for this project was to
challenge my students in the area of fluency. Each poem contains
As the date for our performance drew closer, students read and
complex phrases and multisyllabic words, many of which
practiced their challenging “duet” poem together as a pair. As
students had never before encountered. The most wonderful part
students practiced, I worked with groups to match expression
of the poetry is that the poems cannot be fully realized without a
and pace to the mood of the poem to help listeners better
partner. Similar to a duet between instruments, each with unisons
understand the meaning of the words.
and independent lines of music, these poems require students to
read together and separately, creating a very musical exercise for
the brain.
To begin this project, I shared the book with my students as well
as my idea for a performance in our beautiful school garden. We
previewed the book’s illustrations and contents, and I attempted
to explain the idea of reading a poem needing two voices. This
concept, without an audio example, doesn’t make a lot of sense
to most students at first, though I hesitate to share previously
recorded versions of the poetry. I want students to create their
own version of their poem’s expression.
Our second step was to research the insect that is involved in
their assigned poem. Students did basic research on the insect to
gather background information. Once the research was complete,
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