Poems give voice to students’ creativity

The fourth-grade class’s enthusiasm for the subject is evident from the start, when a simple query from visiting teacher Laurel Nakanishi is met with a dozen hands shooting into the air like, like, like …

Fireworks?

Toast from a toaster?

Quills on a startled porcupine?

Nakanishi wants to know what the word is for comparative figures of speech that use the words “like” and “as.”

“Similes!” the class roars in unison.

Ah, yes.

It’s late morning on an overcast Friday at Palolo Elementary, and the energy in Room D-2 is peaking not because the students are excited about demonstrating their ability to produce the correct answer when asked, but because the next hour will have little to do with what is correct or incorrect and nearly everything to do with expressing themselves in ways that are perfectly unique to their personalities, experiences and language.

Poetry, in other words.

“So often they’re asked to see only one answer or to get the right answer,” Nakanishi said. “Poetry allows them to express a different view that is specific to them. It becomes a refuge for them, something they can always return to, even if it’s just writing in a journal.”

Nakanishi, a Hawaii-born poet and educator who has helped nurture the literary voices of underprivileged children in classrooms from Montana to Nicaragua, recently wrapped up a monthlong stint as an embedded writer at Palolo Elementary sponsored by the Pacific Writers’ Connection, a nonprofit organization that promotes creative writing instruction for children and adults with an emphasis on community engagement and environmental awareness.

Palolo was selected in part because it serves a student population heavily drawn from lower-income, immigrant families.

On this day Nakanishi is working with teacher Cheryl Reed’s fourth-grade class, of which 18 of 23 students are considered “English language learners,” i.e., students for whom English is a second language.

Nakanishi begins with a simple exercise in which the students are asked to come up with adjectives to describe different sensations of touch. Again the hands fly upward.

“Squishy!”
“Rough!”
“Gooey!”

Next, Nakanishi walks around the classroom with plastic grocery bags, each containing items of different tactile quality. The students reach blindly into the bags and describe what they feel. The sensation becomes the base characteristic of a fantastical creature — a monster pet! — that they will describe in a poem.

“It’s great for their vocabulary and for broadening their speech and language skills,” said Reed, watching appreciatively from the back of the room. “The kids are normally shy, but they are excited to read and share what they’ve written.”

It was Reed who first opened her class to PWC last year and who has sung its praises to her colleagues at the school ever since. This year, three additional classes — one fourth grade and two fifth grade — have made time for Nakanishi to work with students.

Such indulgences in creative arts and the humanities were supposed to have become extinct from school curricula in the age of rigid standardized testing. But as a growing number of elementary school teachers can attest, every hour spent practicing the fundamentals of free verse returns dividends of creativity, expressiveness in figurative language and overall language sensitivity that measure well on current Common Core State Standards and other assessments.

And that, according to PWC Executive Director Takiora Ingram, bodes well for both students and schools.

“Writing is a basic skill for life,” Ingram said. “What we do helps the kids, and it also helps the teachers by reinforcing what they are already teaching.”

Ingram hopes to expand the program to serve more schools in the coming years. PWC also recently selected the 25 middle-school winners of its My Hawaii 2015 Student Environmental Writing Contest. As in years past, winning poems and short stories will be published in an anthology distributed to schools and libraries.

As Nakanishi’s designated hour winds to a close, most of the students have already completed the monster pet assignment and are waiting with thinly veiled excitement at the prospect of sharing their work with their peers.

Among those chosen by random drawing is Kaleb-Elijah Jackson, who arrives at the front of the class with shoulders slouched and foot tapping nervously. In a loud, clear voice he reads from his poem “Three Eyes,” about a pet monster that has “soft wings for flying and swimming.”

“He can place me in his mouth and swallow me so I can see through his airtight belly,” Jackson reads. “He has a long tusk like a U and 10 long scale-shaped tails. He has three eyes.

“The first eye sees the past, the second eye sees the present, the third eye sees the future.”