I finally finished my poetry unit with my students. I’ve struggled with poetry instruction through the years and am just now getting to where I feel relatively competent with my poetry lessons. And I feel that I’ve been able to sell my students pretty well on why we’ve needed to be working on poetry for the last three weeks.
Luckily our media center has many fun books of poetry that are easy for the kids to get into and relate to their own lives. I make all these available to the students for selection during our Silent Reading class time, something we do every day.
The unit culminated this week with time spent in the computer lab. The first two days were spent exploring some previously screened poetry websites to find some fun poetry online. Then the students began writing their own poetry. I required four original poems from my classes: a haiku, a cinquain, an acrostic, and one of their choice. They then edited their poems with MS Word to make them look pretty and fancy.
I timed out this unit to coincide with Mother’s Day, and we worked on poems that dealt with moms. So today, we finally printed up our poems and put them safely away in nice “vanilla” folders to keep them from being lost. Hopefully they are bringing their original poems home to their moms for some sweet Mother’s Day moments.
Printing up the poems over a series of three days created a difficult organization scenario. Luckily, I’ve always been one of those teachers who is quite organized. Otherwise, I would have drowned in a sea of poetry!
As it was, I was successfully able to mange the students’ behaviors while keeping up with all the different copies and different classes. Throw into the mix a different schedule since today, Friday, is our Fun Friday time, and we were a bit rushed. But, like any good Friday, the time flew by and the students finished the unit.
Whew! It’s time to relax. And in honor of the completion of my poetry unit, I’ve written a haiku. Just for you!
students board the bus
teachers smile and wave goodbye
who is happiest?
Darren