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3rd grade reading & vocabulary
Course: 3rd grade reading & vocabulary > Unit 1
Lesson 6: Reading for understanding: poetryThe elements of a poem | Reading
Let's talk about how poems work! Poetry is a special kind of writing—if ordinary writing is like talking, then poetry is like singing. Poets write lines, and where they end is called a line break. Groups of lines form stanzas. The voice telling the poem is the speaker. Poems can rhyme or not rhyme.
Want to join the conversation?
- who has an idea of not ryming poems i dont really know that they even exist can anybody show me more examples?(16 votes)
- Here's one: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56159/this-is-just-to-say
A structure of poem that doesn't have to rhyme is the Japanese haiku.(19 votes)
- what are some poems that have been turned into songs?(10 votes)
- If you read the Bible, the book of Psalms is a good example. There are good amounts of Psalms that turned into a hymn.(14 votes)
- My teacher says that having a lot of "ings" is bad. If you need to use them is it bad?(11 votes)
- In writing that's not poetry, repetition should usually be avoided (there are always exceptions though). It gets difficult to read a sentence with a lot of the same prefixes or suffixes.
For example: John was playing cards when a knocking came abruptly. Opening the door quietly, John found a child singing softly.
Note that "ing" and "ly" is repeated more than it should be. There are pretty much always better ways to say something.
For example: John was playing cards when a knock came from the door. Quietly, he opened it and found a child there singing.
Repeating a lot of words can seem disorganized or like your rambling on about the ringing, stinging, clinging sound. Plus, it gets hard to say.(16 votes)
- How can poems be about nothing at all?(13 votes)
- The poem could be talking about random jamboree, or it could be jumping around topics, i.e talking about summer, then randomly switching the topic to shoes, then jumping to markers, then rain, etc. Poems like these are usually classified as "silly poems," and are not really meant to be taken seriously.
Hope that helps!(5 votes)
- PaLm TrEeS aRe CoOl
LiKe My PoOl.
StAnD oN a StOoL
AnD MaKe SuRe YoU dRoOl.
Be CoOl LiKe A pOoL!!”
Def the worst poem ever if it even is a poem. Took me 3 seconds to create lolllll
Just here to embarrass myself ig(14 votes) - What is a fairytale? I think it means like tales with magic right? I'm too bad at english but i'm more than ten years old😥(11 votes)
- Fairytales usually fall under the genre of Fantasy, or fiction. Fairytales include things like dragons, knights, fairy's, goblins, orcs, unicorns, etc. When reading literature, you'll find yourself drawn to specific genres, and all a genre is, tells you about things the story will contain.(2 votes)
- upvote if you love martin luther king jr.(10 votes)
- this can really help the little ones learn(9 votes)
- Poem vs rhyme ? What is the difference ?(9 votes)
- Poems do not have to rhyme. Poems that do rhyme, can be derived into specific types of poems based on how they rhyme. A Haiku is a particular way of writing poetry that doesn't have to rhyme, whereas Traditional poetry typically rhymes.(1 vote)
- Fr how is his handwriting so good 😃(7 votes)
Video transcript
- [Instructor] Hello, readers. Let's talk about poems. Poetry is a special kind of writing. If ordinary writing is like talking, then poetry is like singing. Poetry is a way of
making art with language. Poems can express huge ideas or feelings. They can be about the sound
or rhythm of language, or they can be goofy, little jokes. It's like any other kind of writing. Poems can be about everything or they can be about nothing at all. They can be funny, or sad, or sweet. They can rhyme. They can very much not rhyme. And all of that is, in my
opinion, absolutely wonderful. I think of some poems as condensed ideas that contain a lot of ideas
in small amounts of text. So every word matters a lot. There's a little light
bulbs representing ideas. So I'm gonna look at a
couple of poems today in order to describe some parts of a poem. Let's begin with the poem "Cat" by Marilyn Singer. It goes like this. Cat. I prefer warm fur, a perfect fire to lie beside a cozy lap, where I can nap, an empty chair when she's not there. I want heat on my feet, on my nose, on my hide. No cat I remember
dislikes December inside. So the person who wrote this poem, Marilyn singer, is the poet for stories. The person who writes
the poem is an author, but for poems, the writer is a poet, but who is telling the poem? Who's speaking? The person whose voice we
hear in a poem is called the speaker, which is another
thing I like about poetry. When you're having trouble
understanding a poem, read it aloud. Part of the pleasure of poetry
for me is hearing the words bounce around as you say them. And then this poem, I'm pretty sure the speaker is a cat. Now you'll notice there
are only three sentences in this poem, but they're
separated into 15 lines. You can see these lines have anywhere from one
to four words in them. Lines can be as long or
as short as a poet likes, but here the poet is creating
these line breaks to indicate pauses and rhythms, right? Like normally we wouldn't
start a new line here, if this were prose, which is what we call all
other forms of writing. Prose uses normal sentences
and paragraphs, right? The poet is choosing to create line breaks in order to change the way the sentence or the line looks on the page. Poetry is not just about how it sounds. Sometimes it's about how
it looks as it's written. Now, in addition, the poet is also using spaces
to scoot these three phrases over as well as this word inside. The words themselves are scooted in. They're curled up and feeling
cozy, like a cat by a fire in the middle of December. You'll also notice that some
but not all of the lines rhyme with each other. And let's take a moment
to think for a second. What is rhyming really? One way to think about it is
when the ending sound of a word matches the other ending sound
of a word like lap and nap, or when a bunch of sounds match each other throughout a pair of words
like remember, and December, I want to be super clear about this part because I was already out of high school before I learned this thing, but poems don't have to rhyme. They can, but they
definitely don't have to. I have one more poem
part to describe to you. And to do it, I wanna use
Billy Collins poem "Litany" which sounds like a fancy poem at first, but then becomes much more conversational. I'll end by reading the
first three stanzas, which are these paragraph looking things. Not all poems are broken into
stanzas, but this one is. So those are some parts of the poem. To review, a poet writes lines. The place where each line
ends is called a line break and a group of lines
together in a paragraph is called a stanza. The voice that tells us the poem, the poem's narrator is called the speaker. Some poems rhyme, others don't. Cool. Here's a snippet of
"Litany" by Billy Collins. Litany. You are the bread and the knife, the crystal goblet and the wine. You are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun. You are the white apron of the baker and the marsh birds suddenly in flight. However, you are not
the wind in the orchard, the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards. And you are certainly
not the pine scented air. There is just no way that
you are the pine-scented air. It is possible that you are
the fish under the bridge. Maybe even the pigeon
on the General's head, but you are not even close to being the field of
corn flowers at dusk. There's more, but I'd love
it if you looked it up and read it aloud yourself. You can learn anything. David out.