Getting into Poetry

April is nearly here, and it is . . . National Poetry Month! 

We are linking up with some other lovely people for Workshop Wednesday to talk about POETRY :)

I loved writing poems with my 3rd graders this week. It was one of those magic moments--they were happy as clams to sit and write, because they cared about what they were writing about. We started out with this planning sheet: 

They made lists of things they think about a lot, things they love, places they've been, things they have seen, etc. Every time we wrote a new poem, I sent them back to this page to decide what their poem would be about. 

We did the planning together. I had the same graphic organizer under the document camera. I wrote my thoughts, they wrote theirs. We shared and talked and made lists (bliss).

Once we had a bunch of ideas written down, we were ready to go! This is when they got excited about writing poetry because they realized they could write about whatever they wanted. Freedom! With structure. :)

There are 7 types of poems that I teach in this unit--

Haiku, Cinquain, Clerihew, Quatrain, Free Verse, Acrostic, and Diamante. Each has its own rules and format. My kids loved learning about each one (which was a pleasant surprise). I use these poetry posters with the document camera as we look at each form of poetry.

Their poems were lovely. A lot were about "My Dog" . . . that happens every year. BUT a lot of their poems came out creative, funny, and personal. We wrote the final version in our poetry booklets:

Have to say, it is one of my favorite subjects to teach :)

I hope you can use this in your classroom. Grab the posters and printouts here :)