International School of Louisiana - Uptown, 5th Grade | Science & Poetry
Mrs. Senie

This blog post was submitted by an AXIS Teacher from the 2022-2023 school year.

As the weather turns warmer and the Spring breeze beckons us outdoors, I look out our classroom windows and think about the classroom potential across the street from our school, Coliseum Square. Throughout the school year, students go on field experiences to explore our amazing Louisiana ecosystem through trips to the wetlands. This year, most of them even experienced going out on a boat and testing water samples. But when they return to the classroom, they don’t get the chance to reflect on the beauty and magnificence of those places.

At the end of this year, I decided to help the students get in touch with those observation skills they learned in science classes and put them to work in their creative writing. The Wetlands w/ Poetry lesson from our AXIS STEAM group was my guiding force, along with some quotes from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Thoreau’s On Walden Pond and a perusal of Richard Campanella’s book Above New Orleans.

We started with aerial images of the park from the book Above New Orleans. I asked the students if they knew what they were looking at, and then we talked about the perspective and what it felt like to look down on the park and the surrounding neighborhood. We then thought about the park as a place. Who uses the park? What do they use it for? What is the park made up of? What kinds of animals call the park home? We put all of these notes into a Jamboard to organize our thoughts and perceptions of the park.

The next day we took our clipboards and went outside. Students were asked to list adjectives they would use to describe the park’s setting. They did this by calling attention to their senses. Students could do this by sitting still in the park or walking around and observing the space around them. We came together as a group and discussed how we felt in the park. Everyone wrote down their feelings and then we went back inside.

On the final day, we read descriptions of the outdoors from Leaves of Grass and On Walden Pond, and they learned that an ode is a type of poem that celebrates a subject using figurative language and praise. Students were assigned to write an Ode to Coliseum Square. Afterward, we went into the park to celebrate and share our odes with each other and the park.