Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Our Wonderful World: The Great Pyramid of Giza

Details of my Poetry Month Project can be found here.

Wikipedia

TIME

Time
in the desert
is as vast as the sky
expanding across blue distance.
Ancient as sand, changeless and thirsty,
time waits, encased in a monumental tomb of stone.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2014



Stacking stones
all day and all night.
Just to make a pyramid
to store dead people.
This is all for naught.

But the Pharaoh wants it,
so he gets it.

©VS, 2014


This year, because April 1 is on a Tuesday, I am including my students in my writing process for this first week. Yesterday we looked at this picture of The Great Pyramid of Giza and did a two-column brainstorming activity with DENOTATION on the left and CONNOTATION on the right. Denotation is where we listed the exactly what we could see in the picture, or facts we gathered from further research. Connotation is where we listed what those facts made us think about, or feel. My denotations were big, old, triangle, sand, desert, brown. My connotations were important, valuable, knowledgeable, solid, balanced, sturdy, strong, classic, time, change, changelessness, vast, empty, silent, dry, hot, thirsty. You can see which ones made it into my poem!

It was fascinating to watch the students' writing move immediately in unique directions based on their own connotations. After 5 minutes of my own writing, I circled the room and found another pyramid-shaped poem, two acrostics (mummy and pyramid), three different voices (a slave, the pyramid, and a conversation between the pyramid and a visitor), and poems about the sand, grave robbers, and oldness. I hope a couple of them will allow me to post their poems here later today!

Carol's pyramid poem is at Carol's Corner; Kevin's is at Kevin's Meandering Mind.

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