Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Poetry

Last week concluded a writing unit on "informational texts."  Over the span of several weeks, each student wrote multiple "How to..." and "All About..." stories.  These were published and added to our classroom library.  It's refreshing to see them checking out each others books from our classroom library.  One of my main objectives for writing instruction is for the students to see themselves as authors and illustrators, mission accomplished!  The next unit for Writing Workshop is poetry, instead of referring to the students as writers they have transformed to poets.  All year long I've been reading poems to the students in Room 108.  Now it's time for us to write poems and I must confess that it's a lot harder than I had expected.  After reading through the Lucy Calkin's curriculum, I thought the students would need explicit modeling before being set loose to write a beautifully elaborate poem about a pencil sharpener, paper clip, or other classroom object.  For this reason, I'm pulling in the reins of "write whatever interests you most."  We're using published poems to inspire our own.  Here are poems about what the kids can do: 



    



















Here the students were inspired by Brod Bagert to write a Library Cheer: 























Do you have a favorite poet to share?  

2 comments:

Rachel said...

Your I can book reminds me of a lesson I just did with your pal Eric Carle (ok not with him but with his book "Head to Toe").
The children and the animals in the book do movements (I can turn my head, I can wiggle my arms...) and I pre type "I can ______" and the students did the movements and filled out the graphic organizer.

So fun!

Georgia said...

I find it fascinating how easy and yet how difficult poetry can be - at the same time. Elena has made up poems and they all followed a specific format. ("Mom, I love mom, mom is great, etc" and then "Books, I love books, books are great, etc.") I had to laugh to myself and yet, sure enough, they were poems!