April is poetry month so the students are diving into the world of poems. For the last few months we have focused on learning a new poem each week with the focus being on rhyming words and reading with expression. This month though we are starting to explore a variety of different poetry styles and to write our own poems. The kids are pretty excited about writing poetry as they now have permission to "break the rules" so to speak. By reading a variety of different poems the kids have started to see that the authors of poems use capital letters, punctuation and words in unusual ways. For our first writing experience we decided to write the poem as a class and use Summit Park as our theme. We started by reading the book Daniel Finds a Poem by Micha Archer. We were inspired by how the animals in the story managed to describe ordinary things with interesting words. With our creative thinking caps on, we went up to Summit Park for our monthly walk. We stopped and sat in the grass to brainstorm words that described our feelings about being in the park. I recorded and saved the words for later use. The next day we looked at the words we had collected and started to play around with them. The kids suggested ways to group and arrange the words until we had a final product everyone was happy with. A copy of the poem is below and you will see it has no capital letters or periods - a fact the kids loved! From there I printed a copy of the poem for each student to illustrate. In the coming weeks the kids will work with partners and on their own to create more poems. Comments are closed.
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Ms. Shawna WoodPassionate about teaching, learning, inclusion and kindness. Archives
August 2019
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