Our 5th Grade Friends' Poetry Fun

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:

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•    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.