It's About Time, Teachers!: April 2015

Saturday, April 4, 2015

In my quest to inspire passion about poetry, I have 3 more springsational poems for you to try.

Engage your students in writing a 5 senses poem about spring. After identifying the 5 senses, challenge your students to describe spring by writing 1 line for each sense. You can make it a super easy task by giving them a template for their poems, such as this:

Here's an example:

Writing 5 senses poems provides a perfect opportunity to highlight adjectives and present participle verbs.

We all know that April showers bring May flowers, so during this month dedicated to poetry, rain seems to be an appropriate subject. Hence, try writing Umbrella Poems about rain with your class. (I suggest you provide an umbrella shape for your students' writings, thereby enhancing the shape poem.) The format is easy:

Line 1 - Write 1 word related to rain.
Line 2 - Write 2 words that describe line 1.
Line 3 - Write 3 words that tell how line 1 sounds. (Think onomatopoeia)
Line 4 - Write 4 words that tell what line 1 does. (This may or may not be a sentence.)
Line 5 - Repeat the word in line 1, writing it vertically in the handle.

Tongue twister couplets are tons of fun to write and even more fun to read aloud. Create the first line of the couplet using spring thematic words that begin with the same sound. The 2nd line should also be a tongue twister about the same topic, however, it may contain words that begin with a different sound. As per traditional couplets, the 2 lines should rhyme and a similar rhythm pattern is desirable. Provide access to a dictionary and/or thesaurus to assist your students' efforts. Then have students trade tongue twisters, challenging each other to read them without getting their tongues twisted. Here's an example:

Have fun!

Perfect poetry products picked for you:

April is National Poetry Month and I would love to share my passion for poetry with you.

Try some of these Springsational Poetry activites:

Collaborative poetry is a fun way to use poetry in your classroom. It can be done with the entire class or in small groups. Each student will write 1 sentence about spring on a sentence strip. Give your students a prompt, such as 1 of those listed below. Collect all of the sentence strips and mount them on one large piece of poster paper. Invite students to illustrate around the poem and display it for everyone to enjoy. Prompts:

Acrostic poems are always fun and leave the poets free from the need to create rhymes and rhythm. This can be an individual or collaborative effort. Begin by brainstorming a list of spring words, encouraging students to think in extensions; that is, going into more depth on vocabulary. Use word webs on the board to accomplish this (illustration below). Once you have a nice variety of terms, allow students to choose one of the word web words to use for their acrostic. I often have students circle the word on the board that they are going to use, writing their name or initials by it. If you have enough words, each student can use a different one. If not, you may wish to impose a limit on the number of children who can choose the same word. Then set them loose to create their acrostic poems (example below).