Writing Poetry

Now that we have published our All-About books, we are moving on to Poetry.  I love teaching this unit, and the kids love the freedom they have as they write poetry. 

I use the poetry lessons from Lucy Calkin's Units of Study.

I created a few things to use during this unit that would go with the units of study lessons...just to make my life a little easier.

We started off with just talking about topics for poems.  To make it easy, we looked around the classroom and used objects in the room that we see everyday.  Lucy has a GREAT lesson over this in the book! I have the students add things to their list and glue the list into the writer's notebook.

Poet's Eyes-Topic List

After some practice, I gave each student an object from the classroom  to observe.  They wrote their "scientist" notes about the object.  They later translated the "scientist's" notes into "poet's" notes.  I was amazed at how creative they were...and we were just getting started with  this unit!

Scientis't Notes/Poet's Notes

The page above had an example for them to look back at as they started their own notes.  Most of the student's found this page very helpful and wanted to use it to help them plan their future poems, so I made another page without the example so they could use that in their future poetry planning. 

Scientist's Notes/Poets Notes

As we move through the unit, I am creating an anchor chart to list what we do as poets.  I wanted them to have this to refer to as they write.  I made the anchor chart into a small notes page, which they added to their writer's notebooks.

Strategies Poets Use

During the unit, the kids will learn how to turn some of their story ideas into poems.  We will create an anchor with the steps and add the anchor chart notes to the writer's notebooks.

Story Poems

We practice the strategy using the page below.

Story Poems

I am  planning to have each student publish a poetry book, not just one poem.  They are VERY excited about this.  As they choose the poems they want to publish in their book, they will use this checklist.

Poetry Checklist

Published poems will be graded using the rubric below.

Poetry Rubric

My plan is to add their favorite poems to the Book Creator app to create our own class book of poems.  They are so excited about this!

 Book Creator

$4.99