Over the course of this unit, I engaged the students in various oral poetic activities along with the daily tradition. The following illustrates two particular activities that I believe aided greatly in the students' development of oral poetic performance skills.

Camera

This activity required the students to orally compose a poem as a class. First, I showed that class an object, a digital camera, and asked them to talk in their small groups for about one minute on the topic of what the object represented to them. I asked them to talk about the experiences they may have had when taking photographs; they were asked to come up with descriptive words or phrases to describe the object. Next, I gave the students about five minutes to write in their poetry books as many short phrases as they could think of that described the aesthetics of the object and their personal relationship with the object. I encouraged them not to censor their thoughts so they could write as freely as possible. After five minutes, I asked them to circle their favorite phrase which they had written. I then gave them one minute to memorize the phrase and practice performing it. We then gathered as a class in a large circle. I informed the students that we would each take turns performing our phrases, resulting in the oral composition of a group poem on the "camera."

Once the students knew the objective of the activity, I asked them to simultaneously practice performing their phrases as a class. I repeated this request several times until all of the students seemed comfortable with their phrases. I then chose a starting point in the circle for the poem and the students performed their phrases in succession, composing the larger oral poem as a class. After the poem had been composed once, both my sponsor teacher and I offered advice to several students on how they could improve their performance technique.? We then performed the oral composition a second time.? This performance was drastically improved.

The following video is a recording of our second performance:

Home Language Poetry

About halfway through this poetry unit, I encourage my students to integrate their home languages into their poetry. In my class, over 90% of the students spoke another language at home; these languages included Cantonese, Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese and German. At first, many of the students were reluctant to utilize their home languages in their poetry. Once they had developed various ways to compose in their home languages and integrate their home languages with English, many more students experimented with bi-lingual and multi-lingual poetry. Allowing the students to include this personal linguistic element to their poetry increased the confidence of several students when they performed their home language poems.