Proud Poets

Digital collage generated with Smilebox

The students are loving our poetry unit and are fully immersed in reading, writing, and reciting many different poems. To start the week, we created "Pocket Poem" folders to keep our growing collection of poems in. Then we practiced discussing the things that we notice about poetry with our partners. At the end of the week we practiced reading poems fluently. We practiced as a group and then with a partner. Then we spoke into the iPad and recorded ourselves using the camera. When we played back the video we all gave ourselves a score for fluency using a rubric. The class had a great time with this activity and at the same time got a lot of practice using volume, clarity, pacing, and expression to recite their poems beautifully.

In writers workshop we created a list of big ideas that we could zoom in on to write poetry from the heart. Then we learned how to write a poem in the Cinquain style. These poems have a pattern of 1 noun, 2 adjectives, 3 verbs, a 4 word phrase, and end with a 1 word synonym. This was a fun, interactive, and creative way to practice the different parts of speech. At the end of the week, we discussed how poet's use juicy words to write about an ordinary thing in a new way. We have a juicy word chart started in the room as a guide for writing our own poems.