Poemtopia

You might have heard of The Color Factory or The Museum of Ice Cream – popular, colorful, and highly interactive "pop-up museums" that have made an appearance in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, and across the globe in recent years. In March, Pinewood's Middle Campus enjoyed its very own poetry-themed pop-up museum, Poemtopia, hosted by our 6th-grade students and their brilliantly creative Language Arts teachers, Maria Johnson and Gina Meter.

The Poemtopia pop-up museum was meant as a culminating activity for the 6th-grade poetry unit. During the unit, our students learned about poetry basics, e.g. stanza, verse, meter, rhyme, as well as different types of poetry, including odes, quatrains, concrete poems, limericks, found poems, and more. They also studied and practiced writing with metaphors, personification, similes, alliterations, etc. The objectives for Poemtopia were for students to find a classic poem that spoke to them, analyze and interpret it for a nonliteral theme, and then create a work of art with the same theme in response to the poem. Students also wrote Artist Statements that explained their interpretation of the poem, their process as an artist, and how the two works were related to each other. 

Along with their teachers, the students planned, organized, and executed a fun and memorable event for their parents, fellow students, faculty, and staff who attended. Our Language Arts classrooms were lined with the students' poetry projects, while scattered stations presented visitors with interactive activities like a photo booth and a magnetic letter alliteration exercise, as well as student-made videos expressing what poetry means to them and a hand-painted "poet-tree" for observation.

This project's objectives served to encourage elements of WISCR, Pinewood's student learning outcomes. In using their understanding of poetry to analyze the poems for meaning, our students flexed their powers of insightful critical thinking. By using the visual arts and writing what the theme was using supporting evidence for their claims, they practiced clear communication. Finally, because this unit demanded they be creative and put forth quite a bit of effort both in class and at home, they needed to be well-rounded and self-motivated

Thank you to Ms. Johnson, Ms. Meter, and the 6th-grade class for your hard work and outstanding efforts in making this event such a success!

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