Educator Note:

Anastasia Leyden and Lauren Wibbels

Acera School, Winchester, MA

Joy in the Time of Covid

Each year at our school, classrooms take on a cross-curricular theme, which is then threaded through literacy, science, history, and more to facilitate deep, multi-dimensional learning.  This year, both our mixed-age, elementary classrooms are exploring the theme “Monsters and Heroes” with the goal of understanding how and why monsters are represented across different time periods and cultures.  Our hope is that students will develop flexible thinking, considering systems and multiple perspectives when presented with new representations of a monster or a hero in any form.  At the start of the year, students brainstormed a multitude of monster types and categories, and perhaps unsurprisingly, COVID-19 made the list.  This poetry project, conducted in the midst of an exhausting, multi-year pandemic, provided an outlet for students to consider what aspects of COVID-19 might be depicted as “monster” and how, despite all the challenges and pain, we have found heroes and even joy.  

In the fall of 2021, our classes analyzed a series of Shel Silverstein poems featuring monsters, haunted houses, and other spooky subjects.  The students grasped how Silverstein was exaggerating features and adding humor to make light of something that might otherwise be scary.  We read each poem aloud multiple times, and students could hear the meter and the rhymes and note how those might build up, then release tension.  In other words, they had a strong technical grasp of Silverstein’s poems, along with an appreciation for both the absurdity and the drollness of his work.  (Silverstein is, after all, arguably the consummate children’s poet.)  

We then moved on to several poems, by multiple authors and not necessarily with children as the intended audience, that encapsulated the idea of joy, and students were able to apply the same analytical skills.  In one classroom, a popular poem was “Hill Rolling” by Andrew Taylor, which uses its line breaks and meter to make the reader feel as if they are also rolling down the hill.  Interestingly, some students felt that the end of this poem - where the subject, one supposes the poet himself - finds himself back in the “chalk dust” of the classroom, made this a sad poem, or a poem about being stuck inside.  For others, the majority of the stanzas, which describe the dizzying roll downhill, conjured feelings of happiness as the predominant emotion.

Our own poetry-writing project launched with the provocation, “How can we overcome COVID, something we’ve deemed monstrous, and show the joy we’ve found (perhaps re-found)?”  From our vantage-point as adults, we thought the students might likely latch onto the return to full-time, in-person school as joyous, or perhaps they might focus on the recent approval of the COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5-11.  We encouraged students to consider and brainstorm topics from multiple perspectives - COVID as monster, the heroes of the pandemic, how we might use Silverstein’s technique to remove some of the fear associated with this “monster,” the activities that brought joy during COVID, or new hobbies to practice with extra time spent at home.  One classroom also listened to poems that were written about the pandemic, switching points of view from written by adults, to  written by children around the world, and from the beginning of the pandemic to the present. While we provided scaffolding for idea generation, including anchor charts of poetic devices and a class-generated list of relevant rhymes, we encouraged students simply to write.  Mindful of the trauma the pandemic has engendered, as we had frank classroom discussions, and being careful not to minimize the magnitude of the past few years, our goal was always to keep students focused on ways they found and ways they might explore joy.

Many of the students enjoyed playing with rhymes and creating descriptions of COVID that were simultaneously dark and silly.  Some students’ work was simply edgy, rawly portraying the fear or sadness of the pandemic.  Others did push through to find instances of celebration to explore.  Many students started their poems with sadness but ended on the more hopeful notes of the pandemic, like getting the vaccine or returning to in-person learning. Others felt more comfortable writing only about the things that brought them joy, like baking or skateboarding.  Some played with infusing childhood joy into poetic musings on COVID.

This project ended up being very cathartic for our students; the experience brought up aspects of the past two years they had never thought about and gave them the chance to process it in a meaningful and safe way. 

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Lauren Wibbels is a third year teacher; having taught five grades in that time! She’s passionate about teaching kids all things literacy and firmly believes students learn best by doing. Outside of teaching, Lauren loves hiking, camping, live theater, and penguins. 

Anastasia Leyden is a teacher, a mom of two, a cook and baker, and a devourer of books. She loves sharing in learning with her students and peers at school, and she explores the wider world through scuba, raqs sharqi dance, and travel (well, when it’s not a pandemic!).