Powerful Poetry & Plants

As I sat and studied-up my Lucy Calkins and Stephanie Parsons, I thought about bringing to life a lesson on poetry lines. I absolutely love teaching poetry and have found that it is really helpful to use my pocket chart for many of the lessons! Calkins and Parsons talk a lot about the obvious distinctions between a story and a poem. I forgot to take a TRUE BEFORE picture, but this one will have to do! We practiced reading a poem one of my students wrote… first we read it how he it was originally written on his paper.

We then cut-up the strips a few different times and continued to read the poem in other ways –pausing at the end of each line. 

Here are a few more tips for an effective minilesson in writing workshop! As Calkins uses purple pens for editing, I decided to use multicolored pens (for pure cost initially). This worked out well for me because it soon turned into an easy way to track the number of days we edit our small moments, poems, and non-fiction writing. Each day the students choose another color to edit with and begin to “fix-up” their own writing… content, language, grammar and spelling. I just started using the sticky notes as an additional way to supply versatility during writing conferences. Students can experiment with different words and read it multiple times to help them decide which way sounds best! We are currently working on poetry & BIG feelings that inspire our writing. Enchiladas is a poem one of my kiddos wrote. The top right picture shows the BEFORE poem- you can tell it is the original because it sounds more like a story/narrative. Together, the class helped to vamp up the poem by taking out lines, adding descriptive sensory words, and breaking up words/lines to sound more rhythmic.

Click the picture below to snag your own "About the Author" page and blank poetry paper (as seen above)!

Yes- we are also learning about plants! I love, love, love teaching about the plant and animal life cycle. There are so many great resources created by other teachers, which has inspired myself to create even more. I am in the middle of working on a Plant Unit- Flowers for Our Mothers as a possible collection of worksheets and activities that can be put together as a Mother’s Day gift. We planted our seeds last Wednesday {Yellow Primrose, Poppy, Sweet William, and Cosmo}. The students’ favorites were Primrose and Sweet William! Click on the picture below for a SNEAK PEEK of some activities. (=