Poetry Time

     Our next AIM project will be creating a lively poetry unit in Language Arts. The 3rd graders have been reading a variety of poems to identify that there are many ways to write poetry. We have been focusing on free verse poems. One of the free verse poems that we wrote was "If I were...would you be....?" The students were making connections between nouns. One verse from this type of poem might be; "If I were a basketball, would you be my hoop?" The students wrote poems that were anywhere from five to ten verses long. Another type of poetry that the students have been writing has been the shape/concrete poem. This type of poem is written in a way to make a picture of the thing being written about. Students used a wide range of ideas for this form of poetry. The third type of poem that we have been working on is the Cinquain. This poem has five lines. Line 1 has one word (title). Line 2 has two words that describe line one. Line 3 has four words that tell the action. Line 4 has four to six words that express the feeling, and line 5 has one to two words which recall the title. We will be working with Mrs. Kneeland this week on rhyming word activities to help us prepare for writing poems that rhyme. It will be exciting to see how the 3rd graders incorporate what they've learned about using expression when they read, as they write and read their own poems.