In Ms. Reece’s music class, students are continuing to experiment with poetic language and have begun using their new poetry “tools” to describe their experience of music and musical instruments. The Teaching Artists, Deanna Green and Erin Anderson, have recently added “onomatopoeia” and “simile” to the students’ Poetry Toolkits, and they have been writing lines that make comparisons between the sounds they hear and the feelings or images those sounds evoke within them.
Second-grader Addison took the bold step of being the first student to embody that unique poetical-musical experience in front of the class, by physicalizing a poetic phrase into expressive movement. Inspired by examples of simile in a colorful and vibrantly illustrated book about Duke Ellington and his orchestra, Addison suggested that the rolling “ting-ting-ting” of a piano “is like an ocean wave.” As Teaching Artist Erin played a few notes on the keyboard, Addison further illuminated the imagery by moving her body like a wave in a twisting, undulating motion, mirroring the sound of the piano keys and letting the music move her. As a class, the students reflected on what Addison shared with them, and continued deepening the line of poetry by adding a color (blue) to match Addison’s movement and the sound of a keyboard moving down the scale.
