I LOVE teaching poetry writing! I mean, I really love teaching poetry. But I didn’t always feel that way. Free verse poetry used to scare me! How One Student Changed My Attitude Toward Teaching Poetry My poetry-teacher-life changed one day when Joey Q. wrote this poem: First, let me tell you a little bit about Joey. He was in my second-grade …
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Writing Mini-Lessons
Six-Room Poem
In a previous post shared a “a fishing expedition for poetry”–a technique to help writers generate ideas for possible poems. Here is another idea that I first learned about from Georgia Heard in her book Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School. It is a graphic organizer that helps writers brainstorm ideas, …
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Ordinary to Poetic
One of the keys to helping students write great free verse poetry is to heighten their awareness about things they see every day and to begin to look at these objects with new lenses. The following activities can help prime the pump for poetry writing and help students see ordinary objects through new eyes: One …
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Fishing Expedition for Poetry
I like to start my poetry units by first immersing students in free verse poetry books and encouraging them to name what they notice about this type of poetry. Then I help them realize that poems are hiding everywhere by taking poetry walks around the classroom and outside of the school. Early on in the …
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Building Suspense
Building tension or suspense in a narrative is an advanced writing skill but one that can be explicitly taught, even to young writers. Once students understand 1) that stories have beginnings, middles, and ends and that it is time that navigates the reader through a narrative (story) and 2) how to elaborate by adding specific details like action, …
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Put It on the Page So It Looks Like a Poem
After students have studied free verse poetry, have begun to see poetry hiding everywhere, and have begun to look at everyday objects through the eyes of a poet, they are ready to write their own. I tell them to just start putting their thoughts on paper so that it “looks” like a poem. Line breaks …
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Free Verse Poetry
As Georgia Heard says, “We all have poetry inside of us, and poetry is for everyone.” One of the best ways to improve student writing is to begin by teaching them to write free verse poetry. Free verse poetry differs from “form” poems such as haiku, cinquain, and rhyming couplet in that it doesn’t follow …
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Spring into Poetry…and Mother’s Day
It’s already mid-April and that means there isn’t much time left to enjoy National Poetry Month. It also means that Mother’s Day is going to be here before we know it! Do you have your students create special projects for their mothers or significant women in their lives in honor of Mother’s Day? If so, …
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