September
4
ELA 20: Sept 4 Poems of childhood and a trip down memory lane…
- We had two classes today.
- We continued from where we had left off on Friday. Khalen had just added a great comment at the end of class about the possible outcome of the poem/song “My Hometown” by Bruce Springsteen. For the most part, many people believe the author drives his son around his hometown for a last look before moving on to somewhere more prosperous, but Khalen noticed that perhaps the author wanted his son to have that same hometown and decided to stay to raise him son in the same way he’d been raised. We had a good discussion looking for strong clues as to the real outcome of the story.
- I shared with the students a bit about how your childhood is always a constant measure of where you’ve come from, how far you’ve come in life. We then read the poem “Home Street” where the author discusses that line from which you measure your adult accomplishments. He used the metaphor of his home street being the equator from which he travelled. How far he has come from that dividing line is measurable through his metaphor.
- We moved on to the next poem, “(I Remember), Back Home” and looked for the happy and unhappy memories to create a list and discussed the attached questions.
- Students took a little trip down to the elementary end of the school and wandered through their old Kindergarten classroom. We talked about the boundary they may have felt existed when they were that young. As young kids, often times there is a physical limit to how far away from the “front step” we are comfortable going. Being in that room was a helpful reminder of how far they’ve come from grade school and also how intimidating a place the school was at the time.
- When we returned, the kids have the assignment of creating either a drawing or a map of their childhood, a special place where they spent time as a child, and they have to be as detailed as possible in representing how they “remember” this place to be. The assignment is due on Friday: /3 details of drawing, /3 descriptive labels of what is included in the drawing and what memories it represents, 3 a reflective journal response (handwritten if you like) attached to the back discussing what they recall of their own childhood boundaries and what they were. (9 possible marks)