We Are Poets

For the next few weeks our writing workshop time will be focused on creating poetry. This week we began by observing objects in a "poetry museum" to practice taking notes and describing them the way a poet might see them-- with our senses, but also with feelings and imagination. We noticed how a poet might imagine bees buzzing inside a pencil sharpener or imagine the ceiling as the sky for the classroom or imagine an acorn cap as a little hat. Students got a kick out of this poetic way of seeing the world and had fun trying it out.

The next day we practiced taking the words from poems and reading them written out on the page in a usual (prose-like) way and then reading them with the line breaks laid out on the page as the poet intended-- a big difference. We noticed how poetry has a rhythm and that the poet chooses words carefully as well as how to lay them out in order to make us read the poem in a certain way.

Here is some work we did rearranging the given words at the top into a poem using line breaks.
The next day we talked about how writers, and poets especially, write then reread to see how it sounds, write some more and then reread it to hear it again. Poets really want their poems to sound a certain way. We noticed poets sometimes repeat words that are important. We are enjoying poems whenever we get the chance to hear them read aloud. We had fun creating this poem as a class before we set off to work on our own pieces yesterday:

While poetry is not a genre required or formally assessed by the standards, it is a freeing and fun form of writing for kids. Kids naturally see the world in an imaginative, often poetic way. The teaching that goes into a unit on poetry is so useful as skills for writing in general and will support the writing we do for the rest of the school year. I am trying out several new ideas for this unit from a book by Lucy Calkins and Stephanie Parsons called Poetry: Powerful Thoughts in Tiny Packages. In the introduction, they write, "a unit of study on poetry can teach children to explore, and savor language, valuing voice and repetition...They can learn to read and to write with an ear, appreciating and revising the pace and rhythm of words, and they can learn to care not only about their topics, but also about how they write about those topics. Poetry can teach children to deliberately craft their language, trying things on the page on purpose, hoping to create special effects."

Poetry also is a great way to practice choosing a title, focusing on a main idea, including detail, thinking about good beginnings and endings. Students often end up writing one or two or more complete poems in a session. We focus on free verse poetry rather than on trying to rhyme.