Poetry

I always love this time of year because I get to teach POETRY! By this time the kids are ready to move from writing nonfiction pieces, small moments, and opinions pieces to something a little more fun! First we start off by talking about how poetry is different from a story:

1. shorter

2. where are the periods?

3. sounds like music

4. line breaks

We take this list and we talk about each item...the one I really focus on first is that it has line breaks. I write a poem on a piece of poster paper that doesn't have line breaks and the kids realize how boring it is, then I write it with the line breaks and the realize how different poetry really is from books. 

The next lesson we talk about how poets looks at something ordinary in a different way or light. This is the lesson that I really get to see how creative the are! Here is a poem we wrote during that lesson together:

I would believe they thought of their desk as a jungle...! Once they master the concept of writing poetry about something ordinary but looking at it differently then we talk about how we can look at our feelings differently in a poem. This lesson I taught them that we can hold our feelings in something. I gave the example of holding happiness in music! Here is the poem we wrote:

Next we talked about that two different strategies to write poetry: breathless and writing to something. Writing to something means just that...you are writing to your topic! Breathless poetry is their favorite. This is perfect for my friends who were still trying to write a story but just using poetry paper. You explain to the students that you were outside running around and then you come in to tell your papers what happened but you are out of breath...this helps them understand the line breaks and that a poet doesn't give all the details of story, just a few! 

In this poem we were writing to the last day of school!

This was a breathless poem explaining our clip chart! 

After each mini lesson that I described above the students would go back to their desk and write poetry for about 15-20 minutes. During that time I conference with individual kids to help them improve!

How do you teach poetry?

This week is only a 4 day week for us because we have Field Day on Friday! I am super excited for that as long as it doesn't rain! Enjoy your Sunday!