Mental Images, Poetry, and Spring Chicks

This time of year is where the kids are tired of creative stories or personal narratives, they are ready for MORE!  We have been learning about adding details to your writing because you want to paint a picture or have your readers be able to play your story in their heads like a movie.  So we jumped to the other side.  As readers, we used a poem by Jack Prelutsky called "My Neighbors Dog is Purple".  I read the first part of the poem and had the kids create a picture of what they heard...

Then after they created a picture of a purple dog with LARGE green eyes and a never ending tail, I revealed the rest of the poem to see if their mental images changed.  The next picture is what they came up with.  

That same week I introduced poetry.  It seems to come so easy for kiddos this age and I have to say this group did fantastic!!

I really like the book by Reggie Routman that gives a very simple way to teach poetry.  I have about six days of lessons just from this book and they worked out pretty good. There are other grade levels as well.  I used her one in Kindergarten when I taught as well. 

We started with just reading all kinda of poems.  This book had poems from kids the same age and they were able to relate to some of the topics... "My Little Brother", "My Parents are Divorced", "Baseball", "Skating", and so many others.  After a couple days of reading poetry we brainstormed a list of what they already know about poems.  They knew that a poem could rhyme or not rhyme, they are short or long, it can be about ANYTHING, and they are FUN!  We also made a list that a poem could be about for those kids who needed help with ideas to get started.  Next, we moved onto shared writing and made a class poem about a storm we had just had that morning.  Then, I sent them off to create their own poem.  A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!!

Fun Friday this past week was a glyph idea I found {on Pinterest... DUH!} about spring chicks.  I don't like to get too much into Easter stuff so these chicks I figured we could keep up longer than something that was Easter related.  In our school we don't keep up seasonal stuff too long after the holiday happened.  These chicks are too cute!

Up next week, FAIRY TALES!!  This is one of my favorite units and I can't wait.