Delmar-Harvard Literacy Night
by Jill Rogers
Kevin Gordon, a singer-songwriter from Nashville, Tennessee, visited Delmar Harvard on April 27th to work with students. Mr. Gordon is a Grammy-winning songwriter with a master’s in poetry from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. His visit was funded through a UCEF grant, entitled, “Critical Literacy and Critical Lyrics.” The students in grades 2nd, 4th, 5th and 6th grades had studied the lyrics of several of Mr. Gordon’s songs to identify his use of figurative language and to guess his author’s purpose or the intention of the songs. His song, “Blue Collar Dollar” was used to identify what kinds of things get adults down or gives them the blues. The students in grades 2nd and 4th, then created poetry about the things that give them the blues (and they came up with a lot!) and wrote “blues” poems.
Mr. Gordon played his songs for the students and talked about the value of the writing notebook in writing down feelings and remembering things that can be used in stories, poetry, or songs. Mr. Gordon told the students that there is value in writing down how you feel about the world around you, even if it is only to keep a history of your life and not to be used for future writing. Later that same day, Mr. Gordon returned to Delmar- Harvard and played a brief concert for our parents. He played, “Blue Collar Dollar” and “Jimmy Reed is the King of Rock n Roll” and then threw in “Duece and a Quarter”, a song that he wrote that the Rolling Stones recorded. It was a lively Literacy Night the included pizza and lemonade as well as a museum that featured student work. This year teacher writing was also on display in the form of 6-Word Memoirs.
