Poetry with the Littles

You know me, I am all about the rigor-especially with the younger grades. We need to lay that foundation of creativity and critical thinking skills early on. 

I was watching Dead Poet's Society the other day and I was remembering how I became a poetry fanatic after studying it in high school. I was such a nerd that I had journals of poems I collected over the years (I wish I knew what happened to those). We can inspire students to love words, love poetry. Even my 1st graders understand hyperbole, alliteration, similes and metaphors. My class last year loved hyperbole so much they would just yell out when someone did it. A teacher was walking past one day telling her students she had told them 1,000 times and my students say in unison "hyperbole!!!!". 

Our district curriculum has us reading Pete the Cat for 2 weeks as our poetry unit. I know!?! First of all, not a poem. Secondly, where's the meat? Where's the emotion? The depth?

I read a poem with my class every week. We read it every day and then on Fridays the goal is to put it in their poetry journals and summarize/illustrate them. We read Langston Hughes, Robert Frost, Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky. Some poems are funny. Some are sad.

I emphasize that poems are supposed to make you feel. This is one of my favorite examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_dXM8eVtk8

Kids have the ability to write poems and to apply literary devices-even the young ones!

So here are the responses from our poem this week. Robert Frost's the Road Less Taken. Did they get it?