This week I opened a dresser drawer that holds mementos from various times of my life. A whole category of mementos comes from the period of time that my children were in elementary school. Of course, I have saved and treasured every card they ever made for me. But I also found things like this:
I’m wondering–if you have children or grandchildren, what do you do with these things?! Some of them have broken over the years, so I just saved the pieces. Then there are the things my kids made like potted marigolds that are now long gone.
This got me thinking about Mother’s Day and Father’s Day coming up. After I became a mom, I changed the kinds of gifts I had my students make for their caregivers. Instead of potted plants and refrigerator magnets, I shifted to “gifts of writing”.
I KNEW that most parents, if they were like me, would probably treasure and keep these gifts–not because they are easier to store, but because they are THAT meaningful.
Since April is National Poetry Month, I started using April to create Mother’s Day poetry anthologies. Then in May we repeated the unit with more independence for Father’s Day. I am linking you to this poetry unit.Included are downloadable planning templates and samples of some of my students’ work. If you give it a try, drop us a line or leave a comment below to let us know how it goes!
A quick note: These poems are not the free-verse poems that I wrote about in another post. Instead, these are “form poems” like cinquain, rhyming couplets, limericks, etc. My students always had a ball writing these. The secret to getting good poems is to model, model, model, not assign, assign, assign.
