Music exercise
I ended up doing a variety of prompts with my students, and they varied with the different age groups. We usually made it through more prompts in the older class because I found that the younger group was frustrated when they didn’t have time to finish as much. While I told them that the prompts were not meant to always produce finished products, they still felt like they wanted more time to spend on each prompt. I think you also have to balance the amount of activities, though, based on the age group and their attention span. I would break up the time in the class by going over other poets’ poems, by having the students workshop their drafts, and by doing some group exercises. I found that the students wrote better work and stayed more focused if I gave them a variety.
One activity that I did with the students is that I had them freewrite in response to about 8 songs, in various genres. I asked them to write about whatever came to their minds. I am more of a words person when it comes to music, but I have friends who do not pay much attention to the words of songs, so I thought that it would be an interesting exercise to have them respond to either the mood of the music, the lyrics, or a combination of both. They really enjoyed the exercise, as it was fast-paced, and included a variety of music. After I played all of the songs, and they had 8 responses (a few paragraphs each, give or take), I asked them to pick either one of those responses and write a poem or take interesting images and ideas from various paragraphs and come up with a draft of a poem. They came up with some interesting work from this particular prompt. And they asked if we could do it again the following week, with different songs.