Little Poets
Understanding and Creating Poems in Primary (Virtual Tour)
Stage of Literacy Development:
Stage 1: Beginning LiteracyStage 2: Consolidation / Fluency
Ages:
5-8
Grade Range:
1st 2ndFood Groups:
Primary: Text Structures & Genres
Transcript
One of my favorite writing units to teach is our poetry unit. I was skeptical at first because I didn't see myself at all as a poet, but teaching free verse poetry to young students brings out the creative side in all of us. I used resources from Lucy Calkins and Reggie Routman to help give me framework, and particularly in the Reggie Routman book she has samples of first graders or second graders, their rough drafts and their final products. So when you share those poems with your own students they get a sense of "wow I can do this, because look it, someone else in first grade wrote that poem". The first part of the lessons are to teach the students to see the world through a poets eyes, and there are a lot of samples out there of how a pencil sharpener sounds like it's got buzzing bees inside and how that poet saw a pencil sharpener in a new and interesting way. And then we also have an opportunity to introduce rhythm and beat, and students like that repetitive language and how can we get beat into language, and the boys really love writing about their own toys and making all of the wonderful zoom words that go along with their cars and the snapping sounds that go along with LEGO. So the poems are really, I find, creative, students get to pick their own topics. I think one thing too is they're not stuck to the same language conventions and expectations that other forms of language come with in terms of format. Poems allow them to be very creative, to use fun words, to experiment with line breaks, and they also don't have to write a lot, so they can be a successful poet after a few minutes of sitting down with a great, new idea. So I find it equally engaging for the boys, for the girls, for the developed readers, and for the developed writers, and for the beginning writers as well. It's been a lot of fun, and then at the end of the unit we bind all of the books together and we have our own poetry anthology. And I also find too, the extension to this is an interest in poetry then, so we have a bin of poetry books in the classroom, and the students often go to them and share poetry during their Read to Someone component of the Daily 5 program. At the end of the unit we take the poems that the students have written and we bind them together into a class book. One of the copies remains here in the classroom for the students to read during Read to Someone or Read to Self time and then we make a second copy that we send home to the parents, so the parents have an opportunity to share the wonderful poetry that's come out of our classroom this year.
Related References
About Lucy Calkins: http://www.heinemann.com/authors/430.aspx More information about Lucy Calkins: http://www.unitsofstudy.com/author_bios.asp
Activity Objective
The goal of Little Poets: Understanding and Creating Poems in Primary (Virtual Tour) is to encourage students to think about the purpose of their writing and explicitly teach the features and structures of different types of poetry.
Quick Tips
Additional Comments:
- Encourage an enjoyment of reading and writing poetry by sharing a variety of poems and examples of students' poems during mini lessons and shared reading activities.
- Read, study, and write a variety of poetry structures including acrostic, rhyme, cinquain, free verse, narrative and Haiku.
- Display the poem of the week/month in a pocket chart to review poetry structures.
- Have students share poems they write with an audience using the author's chair.
- Display students' poems on a bulletin board as an open book of poetry or in a class book.
- Collect copies of poems being studied and poems written by students in folders or booklets.
Other Recipes by this Teacher
Read to Someone: A Component Of The Daily Five
K - 6th
Running Records: Assessing and Improving Students' Reading Fluency and Comprehension
K - 3rd
Estimation Station: Developing Critical Thinking Skills (Virtual Tour)
1st - 3rd
The Daily Five: Fostering Literacy Independence in Second Grade (Virtual Tour)
2nd
CAFÉ: Engaging Second Grade Students in Assessment and Instruction (Virtual Tour)
2nd
