DOWNTOWN : Students Get Kick Out of Poetry
What do soccer legend Pele and poet William Shakespeare have in common? Not much, you may say.
But the ideas of both figures came into play during a recent lesson in teacher Joyce Miles’ fifth- and sixth-grade class at San Pedro Street Elementary School. Taking ideas from a lesson guidebook created by World Cup USA, Miles used soccer as a theme as she taught her students how to write poetry.
Miles first explained about rhyming patterns and read simple four-line poems to demonstrate how lines can be paired in rhyme. Then, she asked students to write a poem about soccer, one of their favorite sports.
Alex Bonilla, 13, got the ball rolling by suggesting a good first line: “Kick the ball and make it go.”
Javier Orona, 10, jumped in with the second: “When you kick it, make it low.”
“Yeah!” classmates responded in appreciative tones as Miles wrote the lines on the blackboard.
The last two lines were more difficult. Students squirmed and knitted brows trying to come up with the third line.
Miles offered some assistance: “How about ‘Past the goalie for a . . . point’? Or ‘score’? Or should I change it? Give me an idea.”
The students chose “score.”
And then Cindy Soto, 11, offered the final line: “Let’s go out and play some more!”
In this manner, the World Cup’s Gaining Opportunities to Achieve Lifetime Success program attempts to make language, mathematics, science, social studies and physical education more interesting for fifth- and sixth-graders by integrating soccer and the upcoming World Cup games into different areas of study.
The World Cup’s education and community outreach staff created GOALS teaching guidebooks and sent them to schools nationwide. In the next few weeks, the guidebooks will be distributed to every elementary school in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
San Pedro Street School, on the south end of the Downtown garment district, was one of the first to try out the program.
The school is a natural for the soccer-oriented lessons because of the popularity of the sport among its mostly Latino population, teachers said. In December, one of the school’s soccer teams won the Ketchum Downtown YMCA youth soccer league championships.
San Pedro Street also happens to be the adopted school of Transamerica Life Cos., a Downtown firm and regional World Cup sponsor that paid for the printing of 3,000 of the GOALS guidebooks to be distributed locally. Transamerica also donated new soccer uniforms and balls to the school’s soccer teams.
Miles said the lesson ideas in the GOALS guidebook are creative and effective. “It works right in with our math and language skills and poetry,” she said. “I’m always trying to think of things that will pull words from the kids.”
