Visual and Musical Poetry--MCM

I hope you're celebrating National Poetry Month. We've been completely immersed in poems. Today we watched these two videos of poems. 

I hesitated to show The Owl and the Pussycat because I was a little worried about how the kids would react to the word "pussy." I decided to share it. It was voted the most popular childhood poem in Britain last year! Recently I read Why Kids Think the Word "Gay" is a Swear Word, and it got me thinking about words. Well, the kids did react to the word. A few told me there was a bad word in it. Some looked uncomfortable, so we had a very grown up conversation.

 I was very blunt with my class. I explained that I could tell many of them were uncomfortable with some of the words in the poem because they had heard the word, "pussy," used in a hurtful way in the past. 

I told them I could tell some of them were uncomfortable because they had heard the word being used to hurt people, but this poet was not intending to hurt anyone. I compared it to a pat on the back vs. a hit. A pat on the back is really a light hit on the back, but it's used in a helpful way, not in a hurtful way. If the person speaking or acting is not trying to hurt anyone on the inside or on the outside, it is ok to use most words. I think kids need to be taught that a word is not a "bad" word because some people use it in a bad way.

Hopefully the message got through and I don't get any angry phone calls tomorrow!

I'm looking for more poetry videos to add to my playlist. Let me know if you find a good one! 

If you're interested in how I teach my first graders to write poetry, please follow my blog. It's my favorite writing skill to teach, and I'm excited to tell you about what we're doing!

Check the Techie Turtle Teacher for more movie clips every Monday!

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