POETRY

We just completed our poetry unit of Writers' Workshop. What I love about this unit is when unexpected poets come alive. It amazes me when my very athletic, boys who can be resistant to writing, find JOY and HUMOR in poetry. In my opinion, being a poet is one of the hardest jobs as a writer. You have to really be able to SEE and HEAR and FEEL as a poet. And that's just hard for some. We dove into this unit like any other...with LOTS and LOTS of BOOKS!  

For quite a few days we explored poetry...trying to simply notice what poets do, notice how poets are different, notice how poets play with words and meanings. We tried to notice ANYTHING!

As the students read independently and with partners, they jotted down whatever they noticed and stuck it to our anchor chart for the week. 

Mark and Marco were SO EXCITED to show me when they found a poem about fishing...written in the shape of a fish. So much fun! 

After a week, we had a large collection of ideas and were ready to begin our own writing. In the video below you can see one lesson that we did where I called out a word such as "candy" and the students were supposed to jot down whatever came to their mind, pushing them to use imagery and strong descriptions. After writing in our notebooks for a few days, the students chose six poems to write in their Book of Poems collection to publish. Our collections included a range of poetry from rhythmic poetry to acrostic poetry.

A video of our poetry adventure from exploration to writing is below for your enjoyment! 

Little Poets from Lizzie Ortega on Vimeo.

Marc Brown Author Study

Each year, one of my favorite units in Writers' Workshop is always the author study unit. It comes after January, when the students are truly ready to be creative, innovative, and honestly just brilliant young writers. It's the perfect time to challenge them to write FICTION. We always write creative fiction, based upon a realistic problem that we personally have gone through. This year I chose to have the student's study Marc Brown, famous for the Arthur series. This author does so much of what we want our second grade writers doing: characters, setting, problem, solution, dialogue, transitions, details with adjectives. So to start this unit we got our hands on as many Marc Brown books as possible. We truly STUDIED his word. We collected information on everything he did and what we would like to try ourselves when we started our writing. We created our anchor chart to add to throughout the two weeks of studying his work. 

Then we were READY to write. Not just ready, they were begging to start their own fiction story inspired by Marc's stories. 

Our second grade team decided that our writers really needed to break down this writing process so we took it a day at a time. First we used a quick story map to plan out our characters, setting, problem, and solution. THEN we were ready to write our "sloppy copy" of our beginning, being sure that we began our story with a STRONG lead to hook our reader.  

The following day we were ready to draft our middle (the juiciest, meatiest part).

Finally, we were ready to draft the end of our piece, being sure to separate our STRONG ending just as Marc would do. 

We also took note of how Marc always used a blurb on the back of his book with a "hint picture" as we called it. 

Then it was time to edit and revise. We always use our "fix-it-up-marker" to make changes, additions, and subtractions. We laid our entire draft out in front of us to make sure our story flowed well and also to make sure we used transition words from beginning to middle to end. 

Talk about a labor of LOVE. Finally it was time to PUBLISH. The most cherished part of the process. Our final products were beautiful. I could not have been more proud of their dedication to this process.