Conversation Poetry

This week we continued to focus on rhyming poetry, but we used a different type of poetry that enabled us to really interact with eachother and  bring the characters to life.  We did conversational poetry.  Before Mrs. Kneeland came, our class read the poem "Hey Daddy Long Legs!" and used it as a choral reading to introduce them to this type of poetry.  Students were then paired up and given an animal and a person (such as lion and safari guide, or knight and dragon, or princess and mouse, etc).  Together they worked on planning and writing a conversational poem about the two characters they were given.  Then the next day, Mrs. Kneeland came in and further developed these characters by modeling for them how to dramatize the poem.  We first showed them a short video clip from Finding Nemo, where different voices are heard for different animals.  We pointed out how a whale may sound in comparison to krill.  Then, Mrs. Kneeland read a snake poem stretching out her "s's" to make her poem sound like a snake may sound.  We reminded the students about using appropriate voice and gestures while performing their poem for the class.  The students then rehearsed and performed in front of the class.  After they did that, they had a chance to try on different hats/props from other animal/people.  It was great fun to see them scurry around trying out different hats and instantly "become" that animal/person!