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.