IT'S ABOUT TIME for POETRY MONTH

 April is National Poetry Month.  Prepare your classroom for it with these resources:

These 20 posters each describe a type of poetry.  A sample of that poetry form is also included.  Display the posters as anchor charts or compile them in a notebook as a reference for your poets.

All of the poems and the teaching possibilities in this unit pertain to spring weather, holidays, and activities.

This unit provides teaching points, skill lessons, and activities custom designed for each.  Animal Poems masterfully combines language arts with science.

This unit also combines poetry and science as your students learn about states of water, clouds, precipitation, and content vocabulary.

This poetry unit combines poetry and the history of westward expansion.

Take your primary students on an African Safari through poetry.

These poems and their teaching possibilities are all related to feet and footwear.

These task cards are applicable to virtually any poem you may be studying. Skills range from simple identification of high frequency words to homophones; punctuation to personification; and suffixes to cinquains.

EXPLORE NATIONAL POETRY MONTH!

 

April is National Poetry Month, so let's explore some poetry.  What better way to explore than on an African Safari?  Join me on this POETRY SAFARI...

Load your primary students onto the jeep and discover 9 poetic forms: couplets, triplets, alliteration, acrostic, shape poems, ode, collaborative, limerick, and number poems.

There is a map to guide you ...

... and assignment sheets.

This journey will also allow your explorers to learn more about Africa as they complete the poetry assignments.

See you on safari!

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Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

It's about time, teachers, for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day!

MLK, Jr. Day is Jan. 15.   Do you need resources for it?  Try this one; it's FREE!

This FREE poetry unit provides 3 poems about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Each of the poems in Poetry Possibilities -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Edition has a page of possibilities for teaching. The poetry possibilities are custom designed and include a teaching point related to poetry, as well as activities and skill lessons from multiple disciplines. Topics covered include:

POETIC DEVICES
• metaphors
• rhythm
• sensory detail
POETIC ELEMENTS
• meter
• iambic foot
CREATIVE WRITING
READING SKILLS
• accented syllables
• unaccented syllables
GRAMMAR
• capitalization
• punctuation
ENRICHMENT OPPORTUNITIES
RESEARCH TOPICS
ART PROJECTS
BOOK LINKS

These poems are copy ready and, thus, may be added to your students' poetry anthologies. The range of reading levels in these poems makes them appropriate for all intermediate classrooms. This unit is CCSS aligned. 

"The time is always right to do the right thing."
                                                            -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

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It's about time for Veterans' Day, teachers! 

That means it's about time for a poem. And, of course, some activities to go with it.

Here are some teaching possibilities:

This poem and the teaching possibilities are part of Poetry Possibilities: Fall Edition.  There are 25 additional poems.  Each poem is accompanied by a teaching point related to poetry, as well as activities, skill lessons, and poetry writing prompts. All of the activities are custom designed for that poem. Lessons include: 

• Elements of poetry (rhyme, internal rhyme, rhyme scheme, rhythm, figurative language, voice, imagery, form)
• Poetic form (haiku, tanka, acrostic poems, tercet poems, cinquain poetry, 1-2-3 poems, 5 senses poetry, list poems)
• Guided reading lessons (CAP, phonemes, rimes, fluency, expression, grammar)

• Book links
• History
• Math (graphing, patterns)
• Art (visual, performing)

Every poem is copy ready so that you may have your students bind them into an anthology of their own. 

These poems provide a range of reading levels appropriate to both primary and intermediate classrooms. Thus, you can accommodate students reading above or below grade level. 

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Texting Poetry

In this age of texting mania, engage your students in a safe "texting" activity that will produce some "phone-tastic" poetry. Challenge them to write Phone Number Poetry.  It's easy, fun, and will produce poetry with a new "ring" to it.

Have each student write his/her phone number vertically on a piece of paper.  Each digit represents the number of words to write in that line of the poem.  (If the phone number contains a zero, they should write 10 words on that line.) After selecting a topic, they can begin writing their free verse poem.

Google Doc

An alternate idea for this "texting" is to have the digits represent the number of syllables in each line.  For older, more capable students, challenge them to write lines of alliteration using 1 of the letters assigned to that number on the phone.  If, for example, one of the digits is a 2, an alliterative line could be:

Clever conversations

Or, a line for the digit 4 could be:

Giddy girls gabbing, giggling

The topic of these poems may be one you assign or the choice of the poet.  A fun, if obvious, topic is cell phones. With all the smart phones available today, students can expand their thoughts on phones to include games, web browsing, email, maps, photos, videos, yelp, ...

It's about time for National Poetry Month.  So call up this fun poetry activity.  You are sure to enjoy these "messages!"  

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USING POETRY IN THE CLASSROOM -- Part 7 -- POETRY LEARNING CENTERS

It's about time, teachers,... to talk about using poetry centers for POETRY!

Depending on the age and stage of your students, you may wish to begin a study of poetic structures with rhyme scheme, meter, and/or stanzas.  The figurative language synonymous with poetry is a rich source of study for centers.  For example, metaphors are an appropriate subject for task cards:

Similarly, assonance, similes, alliteration, onomatopoeia, etc.  can be studied at centers.

Writing responses to poetry are appropriate for centers, 

as is creating original poetry.  I find that elementary students are more comfortable writing poetry when they have a "prescription" for writing.  For example, they love writing haiku.

There are many, many types of poetry that are engaging for students to write, but the "prescription" may be elusive.  At my poetry centers, I place poetry posters with the task cards that ask them to write specific poetry.  For instance, when using the task card for haiku, I put this poster at the center:

My goal at learning centers is for the students to be as independent as possible.  After all, I'm conducting guided reading groups during center time.  By using task cards and posters, I have largely accomplished this goal.  There will always be some children who struggle to work independently, either because of their personality or learning needs. The majority, however, can act independently or find the assistance they need from their peers.  

Please remember that none of this happens overnight.  You must invest time in training your students to use centers of any type.  With poetry centers, it is essential that you model the things you want your students to do and ensure that your students are very familiar with the poetry before you place it in the center.

Next time, I will address some random thoughts about poetry learning centers.

If you are interested in my poetry task cards and the poetry posters I created for poetry centers, you can find both at my TpT Store or in my TN Shop.

POETRY LITERACY CENTERS -- Part 5

It’s about time, teachers, that we covered poetry literacy centers.  I {heart} centers that have high interest for the kids and low effort for me.  That doesn’t happen overnight, but you can start to establish a poetry center and train you students to use it.  Then all you have to do is swap the poems and a few supplies.

Poems placed at the center must be familiar to the children.  You are just inviting problems if you post an unfamiliar poem.  Through shared reading, your students should have a clear understanding of the poem’s meaning or essence.  During those reads, ensure that your students understand the vocabulary and have sufficient background knowledge.  Ideally, the poem will be one that everyone can read independently.  If that is not possible, and I don’t believe it always IS possible, have a system whereby those who can’t read it can readily find a helper.

Poems placed at the center are in several forms:  individual copies for the students’ anthologies, an enlarged or poster version, and sentence strips with the poem copied on them.  A pocket chart is available for the latter.  Whisper phones are there, as well.

Have supplies available at the center so that students need not travel back to their desks to fetch them.  You will likely need scissors, pencils, erasers, crayons, colored pencils, and/or markers.  I also place a 3 hole punch at my center for students to use since we collect our poetry in 3 ring binders.

There are myriad activities for students to pursue.  As you can well imagine, the activities available at any one time, are limited and variable.  Following is an eclectic list of those activities:

          Read the poem with a buddy (EEKK)        
          Find rhyming words & highlight them

          Illustrate the poem

          Find patterns in the poem

          Identify word wall words in the poem & highlight or make a list

          Highlight words that are hard or tricky

          Complete a poetry Cloze exercise (fill in the missing words)

          Make a bookmark based on the poem

          Read with expression/read the punctuation

          Build poems from sentence strips

Create poetry with magnetic poem kits

          Memorize a poem

Perform a poem

Another set of activities at the poetry center is based on language arts skills.  The poetry center can reinforce skills currently under study or review some previously taught.  Some skill lessons to consider include:

          Rhyming words
          Onsets and rimes

          High frequency words

          Spelling list words

Vowel sounds   

Digraphs

Blends and clusters

Base words

Prefixes and suffixes

Punctuation

Rules of grammar

Parts of speech

Homonyms, synonyms, antonyms, homophones

For higher performing students in the early grades, as well as students in middle and upper grades, additional activities may focus on the craft of poetry.  Such activities include:

          Make text innovations
          Compose a poem

          Identify elements of a poem

          Explore figurative language

          Compare 2 poems using a Venn diagram or a T-chart

          Write a response to the poem

          Conduct an author study on the poet

In my next post, I will explore some of the activities in more depth.

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All of these products are available in my TpT Store or my TN Shop.