April: Poetry Month!!
This blog post is a continuation of my Making Little Poets blog that I posted at Pre-K and K Sharing last week.
In that blog we were in the process of working together, as a class, to write our very own poem. I wanted my students to understand that it takes a lot of hard work, editing and re-writing to get a book or poem published. So we talk about the steps that they take to do this.
Here are the steps we took in writing a class poem (for more detail, please read my blog
Making Little Poets)
Day 1: Brainstorming
Students brainstorm topics that they wanted our class poem to be about.
Day 2: Getting Started
Start writing the poem...come up with the first sentence and edit along the way if need be.
Day 3: Continue/finish writing rough draft and begin editing
Read over what has already been written and continue to write the poem until it is finished.
As a rule of thumb, I like to keep the poems to 10 lines or less (mainly because I want it to fit in a pocket chart once it is written out on sentence strips but also because I want to wrap it up in 5 days otherwise the kiddos start to lose interest).
Day 4: Edit and re-write
Read the poem and decide what changes need to be made. Then re-write the poem and re-read it again to make sure it is just how we want it :) Thursday, we read through our poem to see if the students liked the way it sounded. As we read it, we talked about the beat or the rhythm that poems can have. This made the students look at the poem in a whole new light and also made them want to change a couple things and make the poem a little longer.
At the beginning of Thursday's lesson, this is what our Poem looked like:
Kindergarten Friends
My friends are really cool!
We play together outside.
We see each other at school.
Some are girls and some are boys.
We eat together at lunch,
We like to play with our toys.
My friends are really cool!
By the end of the the lesson our poem became a little longer and read like this:
Kindergarten Friends
My friends are really cool!
We play together outside.
We see each other at school.
Some are girls and some are boys.
We eat together at lunch,
We like to play with our toys.
We sit together and read.
Walking straight down the hallway,
We like to be in the lead.
Day 5: Final Copy
Thursday night, I typed up the final copy to share with the students on the Smart Board. On Friday, I pulled up the poem on the Smart Board and we read it together. After we read it, one of my students brought up the fact that they didn't like the sentence "walking straight down the hallway" because it sounded funny. I agreed, so we tried to figure out how to change it so that the rythm of the poem made a little more sense. By changing one word, the poem sounded better. We made the change, wrote the poem out on sentence strips and put it in the pocket chart to work on next week before my students perform it! We didn't put the poem in our PIG folders yet, because I wanted my students to know the poem better before putting it in their PIG folders to take home and read to their families.
So here is our final copy that is officially "published" in our classroom collection of poems!
Kindergarten Friends
My friends are really cool!
We play together outside.
We see each other at school.
Some are girls and some are boys.
We eat together at lunch,
We like to play with our toys.
We sit together and read.
Walking straight down the hall,
We like to be in the lead.
~Mrs. Ramirez's Kindergarten Class
Presentation Day:
This week, on Friday, we have our Poetry Celebration Assembly and my students will be able to recite the poem, written by them, in front of their peers!
This weeks poetry agenda includes List Poems! By the end of the week, my students will be writing their own list poems and having them published in our very own Poetry Anthology Book! Although this year I am doing it a little different, to see how I teach List Poems check out my We Love Poetry! Or to see how I do poetry throughout the school year, click here!
If you have any questions about how I did this or how I teach poetry in my classroom, please feel free to ask!
