Transcript

This is a poetry center where we taught the kids different forms of poetry and we developed different anchor charts to go along with that. So one of the examples of the forms of poetry that we looked at was haiku, and so we developed with the kids some examples of haiku poetry and then started to incorporate their own examples into the center. We also looked at acrostic or ABC poems actually, and using the alphabet as a prompt in a grade one classroom, grade one/two, is a good way to get the kids thinking about ways that they can incorporate their background knowledge into a fun, simple kind of poetry; that was actually the first one that we did. And then we moved into cinquain poetry which is a more regimented form of poetry with more rules, and we thought the kids were ready at that point for something that led with the structure, so we developed some different examples and had fun with putting those together as a class. 

We had many different ways of coming to the poems. For example, sometimes we would divide up a poem up by its structure. So in haiku for example I would assign different kids, I would say you need to come up with the first line which is five syllables, you two need to come up with the second which is seven, and I would give instructions like that to the whole class, they would go off, we'd have one big idea, taking care of nature, appreciating nature, sometimes in responding to a text. Everyone would put together their own lines to the poem, five syllables, seven, or five. And when we would come back to put them together ourselves, we would just call out different lines, put them together and see how if you start with the big idea you always end up with the beautiful little poem because the rules of poetry are different, you don't have to tell it in narrative form. So I thought that this kind of poetry would be appropriate in a first grade, a second grade classroom, they're simple forms of poetry but they show the fun that we can have with poems and that when we write poetry it's not so necessary to be able to follow a particular narrative from beginning to middle to end but we can go more with big ideas and looking at things conceptually.

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