Happy Poetry Month
from Team 5B! As a guest blogger this
week/month, I would love to share some of the awesome ways our team celebrated
poetry and writing, as our students couldn’t get enough of it! To kick poetry
month off, my fellow teammates and I acted out our interpretation of the
popular poem, Casey at the Bat. I’ve never enjoyed being laughed at so
much! The discussion that followed was filled with curiosity and excitement to
read and understand more poems. A great introduction to a fabulous unit-
Within the
classroom, all of our reading groups were engaged in reading and annotating
poetry every day. We completed “a poem a day” packet that encouraged and
invited conversations around elements of poetry, themes, tones, author’s
purpose and text structure. It was amazing how poems just “lend” themselves to
evoke these conversations naturally in our classes. In addition, students worked on alliteration
tongue twisters (our tongue tying champ
could read “Better Botter” effortlessly in 13 seconds, by the way!) wrote
and designed hilarious idiom pictures, annotated The Road Not Taken, and
created a “Poet-tree” to help them remember important elements and terms used
throughout the unit.
What made the unit
complete was a visit by an amazing author by the name of Kenn Nesbitt. Kenn is
a poet laureate and writes very entertaining poetry that our students simply
love. With the help and financial assistance of our glorious PTO, we were
fortunate enough to have a Skype session with Mr. Nesbitt. His energy and
enthusiasm were remarkable and so engaging. He talked about his childhood and
when he became interested in writing poetry, and then showed our classes the
power of poems by writing one with us! The process he used and discussion he
engaged with our group was just what the doctor ordered. Our kids couldn’t stop
talking about him and “our” poem for weeks! (yes, they are STILL talking and adding stanzas to our poem!
To close up this
unit, what better way to celebrate students’ personal poetry than with a Poetry
Jam?!? Students spent the last week writing their own poems using a poetry café
menu. The requirements included the follow criteria:
·
- An
appetizer (theme/big idea)
- Soup de
Jour (mood/tone)
- Main
Course (Form)
- Dessert
(poetic devices)
We set up our poetry
jam to have that “café” feel…. Dimmed lighting, cozy atmosphere, doughnuts and
juice, and spotlight area for our authors. And the poems…. WOW. Everything from
acrostics on friends and family, to song parodies for “Let it Go” (became “Read a Book”). It was AMAZEBALLS!!
I am constantly astonished with how our kiddos grab on to a task and truly make
it their own. The enthusiasm and ownership they took for this project was like
nothing I’ve witnessed before, largely in part to all of the above elements.
Just another great reminder of the importance of how we are teaching, and not necessarily what we are teaching.
