Poetry Week 1

There were more strange looks coming from the hallway than usual this week. I think the rap music threw people off a little bit.

Here's how we celebrated week one of national poetry month!


Kindergarteners read Sick by Shel Silverstein. Then, we wrote a list poem about how we HAD to go to school. We wrote, drew pictures, and made it into a video. The videos will be ready next week, when we have a chance to finish.

The first graders read a poem about popcorn, rapped it, then wrote our own sensory poem while eating popcorn. 

The poem we read!

Here is the sound recording from Mr. Schneider's class. Each class had so much fun reading faster and faster as I changed the tempo of the track. We talked about how practicing reading makes us better at it! Fluency! And they never even knew--they just thought we were having fun...which we were, of course.

Finally, we ate popcorn! As we ate, we brainstormed words about popcorn using our five senses. 

Here are the poems we came up with:

Second graders learned the term alliteration. We practiced reading a poem that was full of alliteration using the rap beat to get faster and faster. 

I found the poem in this book from National Geographic:

I read the poem, then we started reading it together. We started at about 75 beats per minute, and got up to 120! 

Then, students practiced writing their own alliteration in the form of a tongue twister using the beginning sound of their first name. More to come with these next week when we finish up!


Third graders had to finish up a project we started last week, so we didn't focus on poetry, but we did do a quick rap. It's just too fun not to do!






In fourth grade, we started reading Love That Dog by Sharon Creech. It's one of my all time favorites, and kids tend to find that they enjoy reading novels in verse. Most kids have never been exposed to the concept before; that books can be entirely written in poetry and tell a narrative story. These books are so powerful to me, and I love getting to share them with students.

After reading the first 30 pages, we talked about onomatopoeia and brainstormed words for our onomatopoeia wall.

As you can see, fun was had by all! On to next week!