Poetry and Poem in Your Pocket

This post is a little late again. This past week we continued working on poetry for National Poetry Month. Each grade level had a different kind of poetry that they worked on.

Kindergarten did Paper Sack Poetry. They had to look in their sacks, without anyone seeing what they had inside. Then they had to describe the animal Beanie Baby so that the others could try to guess what kind of animal it was.

First Grade did what’s called a Fold-It Poem. Each class member contributes to the poem by starting their line of the poem with the last word of the line of the person before them. It made for some very interesting poems!

Second Grade used a website called Word Mover by Read Write Think. It allows them to manipulate what looks like magnetic word tiles to create poems. They loved how easy it was to click and drag the words around. They could also alter the font, color and size of the text as well as change the background. 

Third Grade wrote poems on green sticky notes to place on our Poetree. We have a tree made out of cardboard that just sits around in our Learning Commons and typically only gets used during the Christmas holidays, so this was a way to make good use of it.

Fourth Grade used another website from Read Write Think called Theme Poem. It is basically creating a poem within a shape, also known as a concrete poem. They loved being able to choose their “theme” or object.

Fifth Grade did Blackout Poetry. I had several different pages from different books that the students could choose from. Then they blacked out all of the words on the page, except for the ones they kept to create their poems. This was a little difficult to do, but some of them had great success!

Thursday of this week was also Poem in Your Pocket Day.  I had a lot of students that came up to me to show their poem and share it with me. I also had teachers tell me how much they loved this idea and how excited their students got about finding or writing a poem. I wasn’t able to get any pictures of the students’ poems, but here is a favorite of mine from childhood that carried in my pocket that day.