As an experienced Teaching Artist of the UA Poetry Center’s Writing the Community program, I’ve visited Drachman Montessori K-8 School for the past three years to teach poetry to the second and third graders in Elisa Busby and Rebecca Carreon’s combined 1st-3rd grade classroom. However, in preparation for Ms. Busby’s retirement at the end of the school year, Ms. Carreon was assigned a class of kindergartners and 1st graders, and we agreed that I would teach lessons to this younger group in the Spring. Since most of these students do not yet read and write independently, I would need to lean even more on the oral tradition to scaffold their still-developing literacy skills to help them create original writing. I planned to record their voices on my phone and transcribe their spoken speech into “poems,” but I was curious how I could instill in them a spirit of agency and independence even while I was doing most of the technical work of putting words on pages. 

To spark curiosity and set the stage for creativity as part of an opening ritual in my residency classes, I often bring a deck of oracle cards and invite one student to pick a card and show it to the other students, hoping the single image sparks a unique conversation that leads to "poetry thoughts" that can become part of a group poem. A single card can provide an effective doorway for us to enter into the realm of invention together. 

But on the second visit, so many students wanted to be the one to pick the card that I decided to let each student pick their own.  I then asked them to take turns to describe what they saw on their selected card. Very quickly, the students caught on to the process and eagerly raised their hands to share aloud, frequently beginning with the old favorite, "once upon a time...." Each subsequent visit, I brought a different card deck, and my recording device filled up with their words.   

Meanwhile, between visits, I'd take time to carefully transcribe each student's contribution onto a “big poem doc." Then, I would read aloud each student's poem projected on the classroom Promethean board. When I'd finished reciting, I would ask the student who "wrote" each poem what the title should be.  In this way, students had to consider an interpretation of what they had made, zeroing in intuitively to the poem's main idea.  

While initially, their utterances had been spontaneous and unrehearsed, this second pass on what they said aloud the week before acted as a subtle form of revision.  This revision was not designed to change the words, but rather to re-experience them with new understanding and perspective.  By engaging children in the practice of choosing a title, my poetry pedagogy with these pre-orthographic students intentionally elevated their spoken words into a legitimate and verifiable composition that had coherence. In this way, they could become writers through the act of naming, which is to say, witnessing, what has been made.  

At the heart of it, this act of naming requires listening.  Firstly, it requires the teaching artist to listen to students, often despite distortion amidst the cacophony of an organically noisy classroom space.  This is no criticism.  The Montessori curriculum necessarily unfolds in a dynamic ecology of students at work on different kinds of assignments overlapping within the classroom landscape.  

On our fertile expanse of rug beside the projection screen, my recording device wheeling away as students' emergent grammar burbled forth in a profusion of "ands" and "thens," I listened.  I listened even when I wasn’t sure what I was hearing, often asking them to repeat themselves, or repeating back what I heard to ensure a better chance of faithfully typing it all up. 

But the students, too, had to listen.  The act of naming their poems required that they listen to what they said in a previous moment of inspiration.  Even before that, though, they were learning to listen to the muse visiting their ear while looking at their oracle card and voicing that unspooling line of free association that seems to come unself-consciously to the very young. For the student who has not yet self-identified as a writer, this listening is the very tool that reveals to them their innate capacity for authorship.  In listening, they can recognize and give name to what it was they meant to say; this, essentially, is the work of a poet. 

As the residency progressed, I persisted on each visit to ask the whole group, “and what should we call this one?” More than any other, that question elicited the most urgency, from the looks of how eagerly most hands shot up with barely containable suggestions. Sometimes the title expanded to a full sentence long, or maybe into another poem entirely!   

But here’s the most exciting evidence for how choosing poem titles extends kinders and 1st grade students a potent agency to act as writers do: their growing propensity to initiate the titling process independently of my prompting. Towards the end of the residency, consider my delight when I moved on to the next student with my phone recorder held out, and the previous writer would suddenly interrupt to say, "Wait, I want to call mine...." 

I'd say that's developmental literacy at its finest: the youngest students independently expecting that what they speak and think has creative value, can and should be written down, and is worth revisiting with purpose.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pictured: Ms. Carreon and her K-1 Students: Alex Price, Zurie Burzley, Benicio Cisneros-Kerfoot, Javi Celaya-Bruce, Lyla Avila, and Winne Palomarez.