Selected Poems of Joy Harjo - Music Center

Step-by-Step Sequence of Learning – use these cognitive processes: experience, inquiry, creation, performance, reflection, assessment
Model Lesson Three – Theatre: The Found Poem
ASSESS PRIOR KNOWLEDGE
What is a Found Poem?
EXPERIENCE - Getting Smarter
Teacher Preparation:
Photocopy the poems, one for each student.
Directions for students to create a Found Poem:
Explain and review the formal elements of Beginning, Middle and End.
Give an example:
o Beginning: Once there were three little pigs…
o Middle: Each pig built a house, one of straw, one of wood, one of brick. A wolf blew down the houses of straw and wood.
o End: But he couldn’t blow down the house of brick and gave up.
Model how lines from different poems can be combined to form a new poem.
Give one set of the photocopied poems to each student.
Divide the students into groups of four or five each.
Within the group, ask students to take turns reading the poems out loud to each other.
Have each student decide which of the lines they want to include in their Found Poem.
Have students write their lines on a strip of lined paper.
Tell the group to develop the Beginning, the Middle and the End of the Found Poem, by switching around the order of the papers they wrote on until they
have a satisfactory sequence. One they can agree on.
Explain that sometimes other lines may have to be chosen to create a Beginning, Middle and End.
Example:
Remember the wind
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
A name with power to thread us through
The dark to dawn.
Ask each group to write their chosen lines in the proper sequence on a large piece of paper to be used for later exercises and as a scenario for their Shadow
Play.
Music Center Anchor Work Model Curriculum Unit: Selected Poems of Joy Harjo.
©2011 Music Center: Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County. All Rights Reserved.
10