I taught my students the poem 'A Poison Tree' entirely online during the MCO period. We never had the opportunity to discuss the poem during our face - to - face lessons before the announcement of the MCO. So when the school reopened last week, I decided to revisit the poem with them. Each of the students was given a sheet of paper with the poem 'A Poison Tree' printed on it and I asked them to make their own notes.
They were instructed to do the following things.
a) Identify all the important words and phrases, write their meanings on the left side of the poem.
b) Write the interpretation of the poem for every two lines from stanza 1 till stanza 4, on the right side of the poem.
Students were provided with coloured pens to make their notes and interpretations. They were excited to do things differently. It is a norm at times to just print notes for students to read and understand while doing some SPM based practices. I decided to beat this norm and do things in a different way by guiding my students to make their own notes so that they would understand the poem better.
Before they started the note - making activity, we had a short discussion on things that they had understood about the poem from our online lessons. From the discussion, I moved my students' attention to the words and the first stanza of the poem, once we were done with the discussion, students started making their notes and when they completed one stanza, I moved to the next stanza and it continued till the last stanza.
Since the control movement order is still in practice and students are to maintain 1 - metre distance from their friends and teachers, I did not allow them to move or sit in groups. Instead, they were asked to do the task individually. However, they were allowed to discuss with a peer sitting closest to them, that too in a metre - distance.
To check students' understanding, there were quick questioning sessions after the completion of one stanza and before moving to the next stanza. The sessions worked really well especially after they completed their notes for every stanza as I could actually check how much they had understood and what was missing so that I can do some sort of reinforcement before we could move on.
I did not provide them with notes as I wanted them to make their own notes based on the power point presentations as well as discussions and rely on their own notes to understand the poem. The following is an example of a work done by one of the students :
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| work done by Melissa Annabel from class 5V2 |
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| maintaining 'social distancing' while explaining one the of the stanzas |
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| Sabrina from 5V1 - diligently making her notes. |
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| girls from 5V2 - proudly showing their products |
It was a fruitful lesson as students displayed their understanding of the poem 'A Poison Tree'. After they completed their colourful notes, I gave them an SPM based exercise and they could actually complete the task by referring to the notes that they had made. That was when I wrote in my reflection - 'objective achieved'.
By they way, excellent students can complete the note - making task in an hour lesson but the average and weaker ones should be given a lot of support and time to digest the content of the poem as it is not an easy poem work on for the weaker ones. The following YouTube video shows more examples of my students' work.
Happy Teaching!!
