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"POETRY LADY" SHARES ART OF REACHING SPECIAL KIDS

By Mary Hillebrand
October 21, 2000

WARRENTON, Va. -- "The poetry lady's here! The poetry lady's here!"

It was an exclamation that could be expected of a group of grade school kids. On this sunny fall afternoon in rural Virginia, however, it was rumbling through a crowd of teachers and administrators, held indoors by their anticipation of Arlene Carter-Pounds.

"High energy" barely begins to describe Carter-Pounds' approach to teaching kids with disabilities, retirees in nursing homes and anyone in between who will stop and listen. "I've always got a poem in me," she told the educators, gathered at the P. Buckley Moss Foundation's annual conference on the arts in special ed. With wide-open gestures, lively facial expressions and a voice at once rhythmic and explosive, the colorfully clad poet -- who calls herself "The Sugar Lady" -- demonstrated the power of verse to capture an audience's attention and imagination.

In addition to presenting workshops and seminars on poetry to educators and other groups around the country, Carter-Pounds has been a longtime teacher in the Pittsylvania County School District in Virginia. According to Carter-Pounds, hers is not a unique gift -- all teachers can use her "Poetry Pizzazz Plus" demonstrational and interactive teaching method in their own classrooms. "Part of doing 'Poetry Pizzazz' is becoming pizzazzed," she says. Teachers can feed off their students' energy level, when needed, to invigorate the exercises, but Carter-Pounds says finding some way to exude energy is a mandatory part of the "echo" poetry teaching style she has developed.

The Sugar Lady's Inclusion Poem

"The teacher has to feel passionate about it," she said. "If you love it, if you are passionate about it, kids have to do it. They have no choice. They don't even know what hit them."

In "Poetry Pizzazz Plus," educators use simple rhyming poems drawn from their own experiences and an "echo" recitation technique in which the class repeats each line aloud after the leader. Carter-Pounds, for example, has written volumes of poetry about her family members, her childhood in rural Virginia and some of the people she has met while proselytizing about poetry over the last 25 years.

Poems do not have to be echoed, nor do they have to always come from an individual's own experiences. Teachers can use Carter-Pounds' work, which she has published in several illustrated books, or that of other highly visual, rhythmic poets, such as Shel Silverstein, Maya Angelou and Robert Frost. The basic classroom approach she advocates is similar to many lesson plan outlines. The teacher starts by sparking the class's interest in a subject, perhaps asking a question. To stimulate the students' desire to listen, the teacher then introduces a poem, recites it and encourages the students to "echo" the lines of the poem.

By trying to match the intonation, gestures and emotion in the lines as well as the words themselves, students are drawn into the activity and the subject matter. The teacher's energy level keeps students engaged, allows a measure of movement and activity within the classroom setting and encourages students to use their imagination and put themselves into the poems they are reciting, she said.

Rhythm and movement also help keep students focused on the activity, which can be enhanced with percussion instruments that help students work on coordination and sensory skills. Equally important, Carter-Pounds said, the instruments help the students inject a bit of individuality into the group recitation. "Every shaker makes its own sound, and you find your own rhythm," she explained.

Similarly, the students can be encouraged to develop their own movements and become the presenters in the echoing exercise. Carter-Pounds also urges teachers to challenge their students to read new poems aloud, write poems and create dramatizations or illustrations of them.

The "Poetry Pizzazz Plus" creative writing process, developing poems that fit an individual student's experiences and feelings, can make self-expression easier for some students with disabilities, according to Carter-Pounds. The activities increase student awareness of patterns and sounds in language, help them communicate emotions through words, help children "make the connection between the printed word and everyday living," and provide opportunities for improving oral reading and language fluency, she said.

Though Carter-Pounds' presentations are often high energy affairs that, she says, can be exhausting for her, poetry echoing in the classroom does not have to mean whipping the students into a frenzy. To the contrary, she said, it can be a valuable tool for calming an excited class down, because the teacher controls his or her own movements, voice volume and facial expressions. Whispering, while sitting still and leaning in close in a circle, for example, can bring an active class down to earth in a hurry. This works well in lunchrooms, when children start getting antsy, Carter-Pounds noted.

She also recommends teachers start and end each day with a poem, using it as a "jump start" for sleepy kids in the morning and a "cool down" technique after classes are over. Other ideas include organizing a poetry pep rally, in which a class presents poems to the rest of the school after practicing them and preparing the gestures and other aspects during class time, and holding a poetry playoff, in which two halves of the class prepare dramatizations for the same poem, present them and judge and score each other.

Poems can also be an effective way to help students retain information presented in a lesson. When the students work together to develop a poem incorporating a vocabulary list, for example, they understand and hold onto that information longer, Carter-Pounds said.8