Pytash: Chapter 5

This chapter immediately caught my attention after reading the first two paragraphs. I loved the Jago mentioned how song lyrics are actually a type of poetry. I think students have a hard time connecting to poetry in general. By drawing attention to song lyrics as a form of poetry, it offers students a way to relate to poetry. I’m not really a huge fan of poetry, but I know it is important because I will be teaching it in a classroom. In this chapter, I really liked that the Think Aloud strategy was used with reading a poem for the first time. I think it is really important for pairs of students to use this strategy in order to make sense of a poem. Poetry is often ambiguous when you read through a poem for the first time. I think this strategy would really help students to become more comfortable with poetry because they can ask questions and discuss the poem in a small group. This chapter also talked about why teachers should teach how poems work and how to approach difficult poems. I think as teachers, we need to be cautious as to how we approach difficult poetry. I think that is where we can lose a lot of students because they feel like they don’t understand what is happening within the poem. I liked that the section on difficult poems gave options on how you can approach difficult poems.