Poetry Lesson Plan: Questioning to Make Meaning

Time: 35mins

Lesson Focus
Making meaning through asking questions.

Teacher Responsibilities
Teacher will remind students of previous work with questioning. Next, he/she will facillitate a discussion on using questioning to find meaning in a poem. Particularly focusing on how students background knowledge to answer some questions, others require more research, and still others are unanswerable. Then the teacher will model questioning using the poem “The Universe”, using the think aloud statements below, and ask the class to provide think-aloud questions as guided practice. After developing questions, the instructor will show how he/she could respond to the questions. Recording in a chart if the are answerable, and if so how (using background knolwedge? With more research?) Next, the teacher will monitor, and assess the students as they practice the questioning strategy individually while reading the poem “The Black Hole”, and as they share their findings with their small group. Finally, the teacher will record key observations the students share and if there are answerable questions, will ask students to brainstorm ideas for researching answers, or mark them as questions answered with background knowledge.

Student Responsibilities
Students will generate a definition for inferential questioning and discuss how it helps them find meaning as a large group. Additionally, they will respond to the teacher's example question with a question of their own. Individually the students will read the poem in its entirity practicing the questioning strategy, recording their questions on one side of a page. After reading they will disscuss the meaning of the poem in small groups, and questions that helped them determine the meaning of the poem. Finally, they will share a few key observations with the class in order to create a list of questions. They will assist in labeling this list as questions as answerable with background knowledge or with more research, or unanswerable.

Think Aloud Statements

Text
Inner Questions Thought-Aloud
Response
“The universe is every place,
Including all the e m p t y space.”

“Why did the author spell the word empty with extra spaces?
Is he emphasizing something?”
Infer with background knowledge that the author wrote empty space as he did to create an example of the “empty space” that is part of the universe.

“The universe is every place,
Including all the e m p t y space.”

“What does he mean empty space in the universe? How is nothing part of something?”
Research “empty space” in the universe. What is in outer space between the stars?

“It's every star and galaxy,
All objects of astronomy,
Geography, zoology”

“What does geography have to do with outer space?”
Background Knowledge tells me that geography is about studying earth's features and inhabitants.
Research geography in relation to the universe. Do scientists study other planets the way they study the earth?

Book/Text
Florian, D. “The Black Hole”, In Comets, Stars, the Moon, and Mars: Space Poems and Paintings (pp. 42-43). Harcourt Children's Books.

Florian, D. (2007). “The Universe”, In Comets, Stars, the Moon, and Mars: Space Poems and Paintings. (pp. 8-9) Harcourt Children's Books.

Book Summary
Interpretive and informative poems about astronomy.