Week 11: November 9 through 13
- Daisy Ross
- Nov 9, 2020
- 5 min read
Updated: Nov 12, 2020
This week we will learn about and explore poetry and the amazing
artists who create poems for different reasons. Some reasons for poetry is to just have fun with words, other reasons are to address a serious issue. Even with all of those reasons, some poems are written to share love or emotion. Get ready to join us this week as we learn poetic ideas together.
Monday, November 9, 2020
I’m a Poet and I Know It
Poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago. His mother, Bobbie Scott-Heron, was an opera singer and a teacher, and his Jamaican-born father, Gilbert Heron, was the first professional black soccer player in the United States and the first to play on Celtic FC in Scotland. After his parents’ early divorce, Scott-Heron moved to Lincoln, Tennessee, to live with his grandmother Lily Scott, a musician and civil rights activist. She bought Scott-Heron his first piano and introduced him to the work of Langston Hughes. In Lincoln, Scott-Heron was one of three black children selected to desegregate his junior high school. After enduring ongoing racism at school, Scott-Heron moved to New York City to live with his mother. During his high school years in the Bronx, he discovered the work of LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka). Scott-Heron completed several years of undergraduate course work at Lincoln University and later earned an MA in creative writing at the Johns Hopkins University. ~Poetry Foundation
Over the years people of African descent (African born in America) have used many ways of self expression in order to be heard, start movements, and cry out for justice. There has been many poets and writers over the years who have lead the way for people of African descent born in America. We will feature a few of them this week.
One is particular is James Weldon Johnson who was a writer, poet and activist. James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 – June 26, 1938) was an American writer and civil rights activist. He was married to civil rights activist Grace Nail Johnson. Johnson was a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he started working in 1917. In 1920, he was the first African American to be chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer.[1] He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novels, and anthologies collecting both poems and spirituals of black culture. He is best known for writing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” which most regard as the National Anthem for “African Americans”. His brother J. Rosamond Johnson composed the music to the lyrics of "Lift Every Voice and Sing" with his brother.
James Weldon Johnson is the author of the poetry collections Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day (1930), God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927), and Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917), among others. He published several books of prose, including Negro Americans, What Now? (1934), Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (1933), Black Manhattan (1930), and The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). His multifaceted career, which also included stints as a diplomat in Latin America and a successful Tin Pan Alley songwriter, testified to his intellectual breadth, self-confidence, and deep-rooted belief that the future held unlimited new opportunities for Black Americans.
Both his father, a resort hotel headwaiter, and his mother, a schoolteacher, had lived in the North and had never been enslaved, and James and his brother John Rosamond grew up in broadly cultured and economically secure surroundings that were unusual among Southern Black families at the time. Johnson’s mother stimulated his early interests in reading, drawing, and music, and he attended the segregated Stanton School, where she taught, until the eighth grade. Since high schools were closed to Blacks in Jacksonville, Johnson left home to attend both secondary school and college at Atlanta University, where he earned his BA in 1894. It was during his college years, as Johnson recalled in his autobiography, Along This Way (1933), that he first became aware of the depth of the racial problem in the United States. Race questions were vigorously debated on campus, and Johnson’s experience teaching Black schoolchildren in a poor district of rural Georgia during two summers deeply impressed him with the need to improve the lives of his people. The struggles and aspirations of American Blacks form a central theme in the 30 or so poems that Johnson wrote as a student.
Tuesday, November 10th, 2020
Acrostics I Speak
Here are some examples of Styles of Poetry: Lyric, Spoken Word & Acoustic Poetry
LYRIC POETRY
SPOKEN WORD POETRY
ACROSTIC POETRY
We have reviewed just a few poetic styles so now is your turn to create your own poetry. In order to get you started, we have provided a graphic organizer Using a few ideas on how to get started using your creative thoughts and put paper and sharing them in either a Spoken word, Lyric or Acoustic style poems.
Products:
Vocabulary List and Names to Remember :
Poetic Acrostic Poetry Spoken Word Poetry Freewriting Brainstorm
James Weldon Johnson Gill Scott-Heron Lyric Poetry Free Verse
Directions: Using the vocabulary list fill in the blank spaces with the correct vocabulary word on the attached worksheet.
Using examples of Acrostic and Free Style Poetry shown in the above video and Free Verse PDF attachment, create your own acrostic poetry. Make it colorful and use pictures as well as your own drawings to bring your poetry to life.
Thursday, November 12, 2020
I hope your exploration into the different artist forms of poetry this week has been a pleasant learning experience. Today we are taking a look at poetic expression in the form of mixed media art. In this form of poetic expression, your ideas for a poetic topic are teamed together with artistic expression with the use of crafting materials, printed or created lettering, personal pictures, paint, markers, buttons, magazine cut outs and more. The poem literally becomes a visual work of art that expresses whatever the poetic is trying to convey to the admirer of it. Below is an example of this poetic expression in the form is mixed media art.
A few items that you may need are glue/glue sticks, canvas, construction paper, scissors, markers, paint, magazine clippings and some type of lettering created or downloaded and cut out. Be as creative as you want. For instance, if you are writing a poem about food maybe your mixed media poem will incorporate real cereal, or macaroni noodles or apple seeds, etc.
Parents, make sure to share the creative art work with us in the Family World School group for everyone to enjoy! Also, share right here on our website for the world to see how wonderfully talented our students are. ENJOY!
EXAMPLES OF MIXED MEDIA POETRY
It's Friday! November 13, 2020
Today is come together and create day! Parents join us LIVE at the park (Eastern Standard time to be announced in Facebook page Family World School group). Gather your homeschoolers together with friends or even take your group outdoors and experience school without walls with us. Make sure to bring your written works and ideas along with crafting materials and put our minds and hands together in this project based assignment. Can't wait to gather at the park!
Classroom Without Walls Day Out!
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