Our Own Poems

If you know me at all, you know I LOVE using poetry in the classroom. I am passionate about poetry and one of my goals is to pass that along to my students. We read a new poem every week. Reading and re-reading each day is a way to practice fluency. Poems are rife with amazing vocabulary because poets need to be succint with their thoughts. It's also great for critical thinking skills as we analyze the meaning and themes.

My district curriculum has us reading Pete the Cat as a poem. Pete the Cat is NOT a poem. It's a story. Yes there is repetition and yes it rhymes but that does not make it a poem. Otherwise every Dr. Seuss story is a poem. I will die on that hill. :) We use real poems-Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Shel Silverstein, Langston Hughes. We read the poem Monday-Thursday and then on Fridays we add it to our Poetry Journals. 

All this leads up to the unit where the students write their own poems. I let them choose the topic-although I encouraged them to steer away from things like Pokemon. We practiced using sensory language. The students started with brainstorming-they wrote down all the words they could think of about that topic. Then they wrote their rough drafts. We had a conference to revise and then they wrote their final drafts.

My students have some poet in them, don't they?