Writing in Verse

For the last few weeks, we have been writing poetry. When we began most students thought of poetry as something that rhymes. However, we've been reading lots of different types of poetry. In our writing, we focused on free-verse poetry. We examined lots of published poems as well as poems written by former first graders and thought about what makes them so great. Poetry is a great way to zoom in on writing skills overall:

We thought carefully about ending lines, because those are important in poetry.

We studied the difference between stories and poems, taking out extra words, and choosing our words carefully.

We experimented with comparison, or metaphor.

We tried out patterns, and repetition in our poems. 

Some students tried writing some very short poems, like some we read. 

We wrote about light topics and serious topics.  

We made choices about punctuation, depending on how we wanted our poems to sound.

Each student chose two poems to "publish" and shared why they thought they were their best. Published poems will be coming home soon. As a little celebration of this work, we plan to visit the kindergartners next week (who have themselves been reading poetry this spring) and each read a poem aloud in a little poetry reading.