REPORT RESUMES ED 013 813 24 TE 000 055 A CURRICULUM FOR ENGLISH POETRY FOR THE ELEMENTARY GRADES. NEBRASKA UNIV., LINCOLN,CURRICULUM DEV. CTR. PUB DATE 66 CONTRACT OEC-2-10-119 EDRS FRICE MF-$1.00 HC NOT AVAILADLE FROM EDRS. 225F. DESCRIPTORS- *CURRICULUM GUIDES, *ELEMENTARY GRADES, *ENGLISH INSTRUCTION, *POETRY, *TEACHING GUIDES, CHORAL SPEAKING, COMPOSITION (LITERARY) ,FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE, INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIALS, LANGUAGE, LITERARY ANALYSIS, LITERATURE, ORAL READING, PHONOLOGY, SYNTAX, LANGUAGE PATTERNS, NEDRASKA CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT CENTER MATERIALS FOR THE NEDRASKA ELEMENTARY ENGLISH CURRICULUM INCLUDE AN ANCILLARY POETRY MANUAL FOR GRADES ONE THROUGH SIX. ATTENTION IS GIVEN TO INCREASING THE CHILD'S FLEASURE IN POETRY, BROADENING HIS KNOWLEDGE Cf POETRY, AND HELPING HIM TO EXPRESS HIMSELF MORE CREATIVELY. CHILDREN ARE ENCOURAGED FIRST TO ENJOY THE READING CC POEMS AND THEN TO PERCEIVE PARTICULAR FOETIC TECHNIQUES. THE TEACHER IS ENCOURAGED TO READ POETRY ALOUD AND TO DISCUSS WITH CHILDREN, AT THEIR LEVEL OF UNDERSTANDING, THE MEANING, SYNTAX, IMAGERY, AND RHYTHMIC AND RHYMING PATTMNS IN POEMS. THE MANUAL INCLUDES--(1) A DISCUSSION OF ELEMENTS CHARACTERISTIC CF GOOD POETRY AND STANDARDS DY WHICH TO JUDGE GOOD POETRY FOR CHILDREN AND BY CHILDREN,(2) SAMPLE LESSON FLANS FOR EACH GRADE LEVEL,(3) AN INDEXED ANTHOLOGY Cf 209 CHILDREN'S POEMS WRITTEN BY CHILDREN AND DY EMINENT POETS OF MANY CULTURES FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN TIMES,(4) A LIST CF POEMS, ARRANGED BY GRADE LEVEL AND SUDJECT, FOUND IN THE PAD CORE POETRY TEXTS USED IN THE ELEMENTARY GRADES,(5) A DIDLIOGRAPHY Cf USEFUL BODKS RELATED TO THE STUDY OF POETRY, AND (6) A LIST OF SELECTED RECOIDINGS CC POETRY READINGS. THIS MANUAL IS AVAILABLE FROM THE UNIVERSITY Cf NEBRASKA PRESS, 215 NEBRASKA HALL, LINCOLN, NEBRASKA 68508. (JD) `1:1 A CURRICULUM FOR ENGLISH Poetry for the Elementary Grades Lin OLIN CD 0 w U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH,EDUCATION & WELFARE OFFICE OF EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRODUCEDEXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT.POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENTOFFICIAL OFFICE OF EDUCATION POSITION OR POLICY. ACURRICULUM FOR ENGLISH Poetry for the Elementary Grades 11 UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS LINCOLN T cc)c) "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL HAS BEFN GRANTED BY /3 7/ha& TO ERIC AND ORGANIZATIONS OPERATING UNDER AGREEMENTS WITH THE U.S. OFFICE OF EDUCATION. FURTHER REPRODUCTION OUTSIDE THE ERIC SYSTEM REQUIRES PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT OWNER." Copyright © 1966by the University of Nebraska Press All Rights Reserved The materials in this curriculumwere created by funds supplied by The University of Nebraska The Woods Charitable Fund The Hill Family Foundation The United States Office of Education (Contract No. 0E-2-10-119) Manufactured in the United States of America PREFACE The version of A Curriculum for English published here is an extension of the suggestions made in the Woods Curriculum Workshop of 1961; it is the result ofa peculi- arly close collaboration between Nebraska classroom. teachers and scholars from Nebraska and the countryat large - -a collaboration particularly intense between 1961 and 1964. The curriculumcovers the years of kindergar- ten through high school in detail and makes suggestions for the first year of college.It is not a panacea for present problems in the teaching of English; it ismore like a half formed slave struggling to free itself from thestone.In some cases, the materials represent the state of the art in 1961; in some cases, that of 1967;many of the materials are as incomplete, as imperfect or simplistic as the group which created them. Theyare offered to remind their audience that scholarscan concern themselves with schools and that teachers can fulfill the demands of scholarship; they are also offered for whateveruse they may have in the classroom. Since hundreds of people collaborated in the creation of these materials, nonames are attached to them. They should remain anonymous and peregrine. The Nebraska Curriculum Development Center iii CONTENTS Page Introduction to the Elementary SchoolProgram I. Introduction to the Poetry Unit 1 II. Background Information for the Teacher A. What Is Poetry? 3 B. Elements of Poetry 3 Presentation of Poetry 9 III. Suggested Procedures A. Listening to and Di3cussing Poetry 11 B. Creative Expression 12 C. Choral Reading 16 D. Extended Activities 20 E, Sample Lesson Plans 21 IV.Anthology A. A Green Thought in a Green Shade 29 B. Cuckoo, Jug, Jug, Pee Wee, To WittaWoo 41 C. My Splendours Are Menagerie 57 D. Children's Toys and Old Men's Reasons 77 E. A Red Wheel Barrow 82 F. In Xanadu 96 G. 0 Western Wind, When Wilt Thou Blow 109 H. Oh! Sing Unto My Roundelay 125 I. A Song for the Intangible 165 V. Recommended Poems in Core Texts A. Time for.Poetry 185 B. The Golden Treasury of Poetry 192 VI. Index 199 VII. Selected Recordings of Poetry Readings 205 INTRODUCTION TO THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL PROGRAM The Nebraska elementary program is divided into units; the units center in the study of literature, often literature read aloud, and include work in language and composition integral to such study. II, may be in order to describe the premi3es of the program. I. Premises of the Program For at least twenty centuries, the best literature produced in the western world was presented orally to audiences of many ages and social levels.And if it is true that great audiences produce great artists, then the audiences of such literature must have penetrated its meaning and been sensitive to its literary merit; there must have been some route of interchange of inspiration continually open between writers and audiences. From this it does not follow that children who as yet do not read should be insensible to the attractions of fine litera- ture when it is appropriate to their level of intellect, imagination and rhythmic sense.Before a child is able to read, before he is able to cope with the only partially systematic English graphemic system, he has the need to come in contact with literature:if he cannot read, he can surely be read to--and this is a basic notion of the early units in this curriculum. We should surprise few teachers in saying that children can tell stories, oral tales, cycles of tales; they can create their own literary culture so to speak, and they perhaps can do this best at the prompting and inspiration of excellent literary works.Storytelling, modeled and unmodeled, is thus a foundation activity suggested in this curriculum. The child's basically oral approach to literature will change as he masters reading skills, but he must know and feel that these reading skills are worth learning. The elementary school program for language, literature and composition should not be confused with a reading program,It is neither such a program npr a substitute for such a program. The development of methods for the teaching of reading is the proper con- cern of the reading expert and not of this study.Further linguistic research may lead to improvements in methods for the teaching of reading; and, when sufficient research data indicates that these improvements have been made, they should be synthesized in this curriculum.Our concern is with showing such literature as will make reading worth the effort, composition an exercise in the imitation of excellence, and language study more than a bore, The language, literature and composition program for the elementary school is designed to teach students (1) to comprehend the more frequent oral and written conventions of literature composed for young children--formal or generic conventions or simple rhetorical conventions;(2) to control these linguistic and literary conventions in their own writing; and (3) to comprehend consciously the more frequent grammatical conventions which they can handle in their speaking and writing. One who plans an elementary curriculum must first identify the basic generalizations of the discipline, second, represent these gen- eralizations so that they can be taught to children, and third, build a spiral curriculum which covers those basic concepts in ever greater depth, thus developing a progressively more sophisticated understanding of them.Once introduced in a relatively simple fashion, a concept will be treated somewhat more intensively each time it appears.All in all, the units of the curriculum intend to expose the student repeat- edly to facts and ideas that he may use in order to proceed inductively to general conclusions about the conventions of good literature. The child's sense of logic develops from an intuitive, anthropo- morphic apprehension to the more analytical apprehension of the junior high school student.The curriculum's sequence of literary works and of suggested analogous compositions endeavors to display the same progress from the "mythic" and anthropomorphic to the realistic and the analytic, although this does not imply that the program at its upper levels ignores "fabulous" literature and comparable compositional forms. (The basic attitudes toward the psychology of children's literature,its relation to cognition, and the place of its emergence in psychology upon which this curriculum is based are set forth in the following books:Philippe Aries, L' Enfant et la vie familiale sous Pancien regime;Jan Van Den Berg,"Adults and Children, " in The Changing Nature of Man;Northrup Frye, Design for LearningCa molification of the generic theory used in this program].) II. The Units The materials for the curriculum program in the elementary school consist of seventy specific units for the various grade levels plus two packets of ancillary materials:Poetry for the Elementary Grades and Language. Explorations for the Elementary Grades. The units suggested for the elementary level endeavor to arrange literary works in an articulated sequence designed to develop the concepts essential to the literature program in the spiral fashion mentioned above.