Civic Action: 12.02 - Illustrated Poetry & Belongingness Revisions

We started today's class by talking about memorization and how a key to memorization is connecting with what you are memorizing in different ways. One way that people have found helpful in connecting to something they have to memorize is to clearly visualize what they are saying.

To engage this memorization technique I provided students with an illustrated stanza sheet for their poem. I described how to go about completing this sheet. It is important for drawings to be detailed so that each person is very clearly developing clear visual imagery to go with their poem. This does not mean someone has to be a good artist, they just have to have a drawing with plenty of detail. I used the first stanza of my poem "To a Mouse" as an example in class (see below).

Illustrations should have more detail than this illustration.
Due to time constraints, I sketched out the first few ideas for my illustration.

Everyone then had 25 minutes to work on illustrating the stanzas (or visual sections) of their poem.
If you did not finish illustrating your poem in class, do so for homework.

We then reviewed class performance on the belongingness assignments (Explain Like I'm 5: Belongingness and letters to Rufus Wainwright regarding his song "One Man Guy). Overall feedback on class performance and specific information regarding how to approach the assignments is available below.