March 27, 2002
Writing workshop shows students power of poetry
Terry Wooten spends four days teaching at Eastern Elementary
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
When poet Terry Wooten was young, he thought the sky was in mud puddles, that if he jumped in he could fly.
Now an established poet who travels the state and country sharing poetry with students of all ages, Wooten flies with words, creating images that soar.
Last week he spent four days with students at Eastern Elementary School showing students the infinite power of words and imagination. Putting pencil to paper, the students wove pictures in poetry and flew - with Wooten's teachings about power words and similes, memories and stories lifting them.
"Poems are happening during conversation all the time," said Wooten, who has been teaching in schools for 19 years.
Wooten revels in sharing poetry with children, whether it is giving animated renderings of some of the more than 450 poems he has memorized or helping a student find a voice to express himself.
"There's always neat little things that are happening, when that creative process is working and they are pulling out those images," he said. "Sometimes the kids will get it sometimes they won't, but the idea is one they can continue with the rest of their life," he noted.
By Thursday afternoon, after more than three days of composition and streamlining, the students presented their poems in a series of readings moderated by sixth-grade students. The poems were presented in a non-competitive environment, in keeping with Wooten's philosophy to encourage all efforts.
"If someone laughs or a kid doesn't win some prize, they may never write another poem again," Wooten said.
The quality of the work coming after just four days was impressive, noted Bill Smith, principal of the school. He also said that the school plans to compile all the poems into an anthology to be kept in the library as well as give them to the students.
"I read one from one of our physically or otherwise health impaired students and it was awesome," said Smith, who read some works over the PA Friday morning. "A school improvement goal this year was to improve our writing and we were looking for some different ways to do that."
Even first and second grade students composed telling similes about themselves. Students in Jane Boerema's mixed first and second grade class wrote three self-descriptive lines Thursday morning. Boerema, Wooten and classroom aids then read the poems aloud to the class while students guessed who wrote each one. Many of the guessers hit the mark on the first try because of the vivid images in the works.
"We've really worked on our writing this year," Boerema said.
Wooten had the third and fourth grade students composing animal free-verse poems while fifth and sixth grade students created a memory map and illustrated it. They also created a poem using the topic and style of their choice.
While Wooten usually works with junior high and upper elementary age students, he enjoyed the opportunity to also teach the younger students at Eastern. Even at the kindergarten level, he planted a seed of interest about poetry through his readings of different poems.
"It was a kind of learning experience because you go by the seat of your pants below the fourth grade," Wooten said. "I was teaching some pretty advanced concepts like free-verse line structure to them."
Wooten noted that he has a particular affinity for free-verse poetry, which has a definite physical shape. He coached students in the third and fourth grade on how best to include power words - and avoid what he called nerd words - and line breaks to tell a compelling story. Wooten also told students to think of poems as songs, ones that are spoken instead of sung.
"I see that way, being dyslexic, so I try to point out the images through the words, what we call the power words," he said. "I just talk about what I'm writing about and then I write it down as I said it, using my mind as a tape recorder. Think of poems as songs, only you don't sing them, you say them."
One power of poetry is that it can make any student shine.
"There is a certain kind of intelligence that doesn't show up on standardized tests but can come out in the arts," Wooten said.