Poetry Fun

The third graders had fun writing "I Am" poems. I got the template from One Extra Degree. We worked with the counselor to talk about positive self-image and brainstormed words for our poems. Then we copied them down, took pictures on our iPads & printed them out. The poems are hanging in the hallway with the pictures underneath. The poems don't have their names on them, so the kids had a fun time reading each other's work and trying to guess whose poem was whose! 

The 6th graders tried blackout poems for the first time. I copied a page from some popular books: Harry Potter, Catching Fire, and Savvy, and then showed the students how to black them out. First, we read the page and thought about words that stuck out to us. Then, we reread it and underlined or circled the words that we liked, and finally tried to put them together to make a poem that makes sense. Our last step was to black out everything that wasn't underlined. Some of these turned out really well! 

With the bulletin board that is in the library, I try to have something interactive. For poetry month, we are having pushpin poetry. As kids finish their work, they have different options that they can participate in, and this is one of them. Some of the 6th graders had a good time making poems!

One of my favorite things to do with poetry is to make poetry raps. I picked a poem for kindergarteners that had many sight words in it. We used the Promethean board to highlight sight words, and to circle words we didn't know. I also drew little illustrations next to the word in each line that changed. It's evident why I'm not an art teacher! Then, I read the poem aloud once. Students joined me in reading aloud a few times through. I had already created a beat in Garageband that we used to rap with. I played the music and we rapped the poem. Each time we read it, I increased the tempo in Garageband by 5 beats. It was a fun challenge to see how fast we could read!

The 4th graders spent some time writing acrostic poems. I love their themes! We brainstormed and used dictionaries to come up with words and phrases. I love these!

I know that these are kind of hard to see, but the kindergarteners wrote number list poems after reading a number poem about a circus. We split into two groups--one group wrote about what would go into the best pot of soup, and the other group wrote what would go into the worst soup ever. We've got candy, tomatoes, & cookies in one, and diapers, bricks, and bugs in the other! I love their creativity.