Mª VICTORIA DE LERA

The activity is called “influpoets”. The main objective is to give the reading promotion plan of my fourth of ESO students a fresh start. The idea came up last year as soon as we saw AMANDA GORMAN become world famous when she recited “THE HILL WE CLIMB” at the inauguration of Joe Biden´s presidency.

I didn´t miss the opportunity to work the poem in class and contrary to some students belief, most of them loved it. It is clear that thanks to Gorman´s brilliant declamation, more and more young people have begun to read and love poetry. This year I decided to go further in that way by giving a try to the instapoets.

The idea came up while scrolling Instagram and found out Rupi Kaur´s poems. Then, I discovered more poets that publish their works on Social Media; they are easy to read but at the same time they are quite meaningful for the students. I tried to look up and I found this article https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/best-poets-on-instagram. We read it in class, and we decided for Rupi Kaur https://www.instagram.com/rupikaur_/

First of all, we worked some of her poems in class in order to provide students with some scaffolding when analysing poems. Besides, in order to work the four skills, I raised some debate questions about one of her poems concerning first love and its relevance in one´s life

YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN MY FIRST LOVE

BUT YOU WERE THE LOVE THAT MADE

ALL THE OTHER LOVES

IRRELEVANT

by Rupi Kaur

With this other poem, I divided the class in groups and while using cooperative techniques (think-pair- share), they haye to come up with reasons in favour of /against being friend with your friend. Finally, they have to take turns to present their opinions

YOU ASK

IF WE CAN STILL BE FRIENDS

I EXPLAIN HOW A HONEYBEE

DOES NOT DREAM OF KISSING

THE MOUTH OF A FLOWER

AND THEN SETTLE FOR ITS LEAVES

-I DON'T NEED MORE FRIENDS

The last part of the activity was to create a free verse poem, draw a meaningful picture of it and finally record it with https://info.flipgrid.com/. In this way, students work the productive and receptive skills in an integrated way. They were given a poem assessment and a poem declamation rubric. Both of which were used by their peers for peer assessment.