Day
1 –
introduction
Tues. 11/5
what is poetry?
Day
2 –
couplet
Wed. 11/6
rhyming
Day
3 –
unrhyming/unrhythmic
Thurs. 11/7
describe a feeling
- - -
Day
4 –
limerick
Tues. 11/12
tell a story, pun, or joke
Day
5 –
nonsense
Wed. 11/13
onomatopoei
Day
6 – sonnet
Thurs. 11/14
metaphor and simile
- - -
Day
7 –
haiku
Tues. 11/19
adjectives, describing words
Day
8 –
cinquain
Wed. 11/20
adjectives, describing words
Day
9 – Play/lines/conversation
Thurs. 11/21
past, present, future
- - -
Day
10 –
shapes
Mon. 11/25
metaphor and simile
Day
12 – Thanksgiving
audience
- - -
Final
Project: Publishing the
Poetry
Mon.-Tues. 12/2-12/3
Objective:
Students will be able to explain what makes a poem.
Materials: poetry
samples, dry erase board and marker
Procedures:
Read “Short Gaits with Three Spiders.”
What is it? Not a story, not a report… a
poem.
What is a poem? What do we know about poetry? How is it like/unlike prose? Who reads it and when and where? What can it be written about? How long is it? (Look at the 2-line poem, and the Odyssey)
Read a few aloud, incl. “Eletelephony” and “To be or not to be.”
Poems/Resources:
Short Gaits with Three Spiders (Matt Welter)
Eletelephony (L Richards)
Zoo (student)
To Be or Not To Be (Shakespeare)
No (Silverstein)
Three Stings (Silverstein)
Daddy Fixed the Breakfast (John Ciardi)
Objective: Students will write at least one poem using rhyming words.
Materials: poetry
samples, writing notebooks and pencils
Procedures:
Read “Father William.”
Give the students a copy of “Spider, Spider” and read it together.
What is special about the sounds at the end of each line? (they rhyme) Those two likes together are called a couplet. Read “Zoo” and “Hog.”
Review the rhyming sounds that have been discussed in Word Block (often words that have the same spelling pattern will rhyme and vice versa).
Read the first stanza or two of “A Bird Came Down the Walk.” Note that the rhyming lines aren’t always next to each other.
Write some rhyming words on the board and make a short poem about a spider together. It can be long, like “Father William” was, or short, like “Stone Airplane.” Note also that sometimes there’s nothing to rhyme with a word, and it must be changed (for example, orange or purple – or W?)
Students return to their desks to write at least two poems using rhymes.
Check on the students while they work. The teacher or fellow students can help each other find rhyming words.
Poems/Resources:
Spider, Spider (student)
W (James Reeves)
Father William (L Carroll)
Show Fish
(Silverstein)
Stone Airplane
(Silverstein)
A Bird Came Down
the Walk (
Zoo (student)
Hog (student)
Objective:
Students will write at least one unrhyming poem.
Students will use words to describe or evoke a
feeling.
Materials: poetry
samples, writing notebooks and pencils
Procedure
Read the book/poem Hoops to the
class. Ask how it makes them feel.
Read “Listening to Grownups Quarreling.”
What feeling does that poem create?
What are some words that gave you these feelings?
Read “When My Dog Died.” What feeling
does that give you? Do you think “The Eviction” will be like that
too? (read it) Was it?
Did any of these poems rhyme? Poems
don’t always have to rhyme.
Poems/Resources:
When my dog died (Freya Littledale, treasury)
Eviction (L
Clifton, treasury)
Listening to
grownups quarreling (Ruth Whitman, treasury)
Tell a story, pun,
or joke
Objective:
Students will write at least one limerick, using the proper format and rhyme
pattern.
Procedure:
Define “epicure” and read “An epicure,
dining at crew”
Ask students if they know what kind of
poetry that was.
Give students a copy of some limericks and
read one together
Write the rhyme scheme (a-a-b-b-a) on the
board as well as the pattern of
Explain that limericks often tell a story,
joke or pun.
Give the students the mixed-up lines of a
limerick and ask them to put them in order, based on what they know about the
beats and the rhymes.
Allow the students to write their own
limericks.
Poems/Resources:
Treasury page 114-117
Linking
Literature page 73
An epicure, dining
at crew (anon)
Onomatopoeia
Objective:
Students will write at least one nonsense poem.
Students will use
onomatopoeia in their poem.
Materials: poetry
samples, writing notebooks and pencils
Procedure:
Ask some students to volunteer to perform a
poem as you read it.
Read “Jabberwocky” aloud to the
class. If the student performers look mystified, help them along a little
– what does the sound of the word make you think of?
Explain what onomatopoeia is, and how it
can be used.
Read some more nonsensical poems to the
class
Let the students write a nonsense poem,
either with made-up words that sound right, or using real words to tell about
something silly and using normal onomatopoeia.
Poems/Resources:
Jabberwocky (L
Carroll)
Various poems
(Silverstein and Pulasky)
Performers:
Stephen – boy,
metaphor and simile
Objective:
Students will choose the purpose, audience, and topic for a poem of their own.
Students will make
some sort of comparison in their poem using metaphors or similes.
Materials: poetry
samples, writing notebooks and pencils
Procedure:
Read Sonnet 43 by Shakespeare to the
class. What was he comparing her to?
Ask if anyone has a guess as to who wrote
it and what kind of poem it was.
Explain, in general terms, what a sonnet
is, and read Sonnet 130.
What kinds of his things was he comparing
her to there?
See if the children know what a metaphor
and simile are, and explain them.
Read “The moon was but a chin of gold” by
Allow the students to write a poem or two
on their own in any style, using at least one simile or metaphor.
Poems/Resources:
The moon was but a
chin of gold (
Sonnets XVIII and
CXXX (Shakespeare)
adjectives, describing words
Objective: Students will demonstrate understanding of
what haiku is by writing one or two haiku
Students will
effectively use describing words in their poetry
Materials: haiku
examples, writing notebooks and pencils
Procedure:
Ask the children to review what forms of
poetry have been used so far.
Tell them a little about haiku – where it
comes from, what it’s about, but not the technical details.
Read two samples of haiku.
Ask what the children notice. (It’s
short. The lines are short. Etc.)
Pass out the explaining haiku and read it
aloud as the students follow along. The format is explained in this piece
Look at the describing words in some more
haiku examples.
Write a haiku on the board about the plants
the class grew for science last month.
Ask the children to write one or two haiku
using the correct format and at least one adjective.
Poems/Resources:
Definition Haiku (The
Everything Kids Nature Book)
Student-written
samples
Adaptations: If
the identified students have a hard time getting the syllables right, it’s
OK. Give them some help if they need it. But I think they’ll do
fine.
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adjectives, describing words
Objective: Students
will write a cinquain
Students will effectively use adjectives in their poetry
Materials: poetry
samples, writing notebooks and pencils
Procedure:
Introduce the word cinquain. Ask the
children if they have any idea what it could mean. Clue: Think of Spanish
numbers.
Read “Candy.” That is a cinquain. Do they know why the poem is called that now?
Pass out the poems so that they can see the five lines.
Read “Father.” Try to decide what goes on each line. Write the format on the board.
Read “Crayons.” Check to see if it fits the pattern.
Put the words for “Horses” in order on the board.
Students write a cinquain of their own.
Poems/Resources:
Candy
Father
Horses
Crayons (all by me)
Cinquain
1: 1 word, noun
2: 2 words,
adjectives
3: 3 words,
actions
4: 4 words,
feelings
5: 1 word, noun
Play/lines/conversation
Objective:
Students will display their growing familiarity with poetry by continuing to
write poems in their writing notebooks.
Materials: writing
notebooks, pencils, poems
Procedure:
Have some fluent readers familiarize
themselves with “The Quiet Evenings Here” before or during the lesson.
With a helper, read aloud “Water Striders.”
Ask the students: could that poem be read
silently? Why do they think so, or think not?
With a helper, read “Honeybees.” Does
it ever sound like this when you are talking with your friends? Which bee
is right? Why?
Pass out “Water Boatmen” and read it
together. Have one half of the class read one part and the other half
read the other part. How else could it be read?
If time permits, have four students read
“The Quiet Evenings Here.”
Read some lines from a Shakespeare play in
which two or more characters are dialoging. Is this poetry as well?
Ask the children to write some poems of
their own. They don’t have to be dialogue; they may want to finish a poem
they started another day.
Poems/Resources:
Joyful Noise: (P Fleishman)
-Water boatmen
(copy for class)
-Honeybees (copy
and perform)
-Water striders (copy and perform)
Big Talk: (P Fleishman)
-The Quiet
Evenings Here (copy for students to perform)
lines from Shakespeare
Materials: writing
journals, pencils, poems
Procedures:
Read aloud, and show the class, “I Am
Winding Through a Maze.”
Why do you think the author wrote the poem
this way? How might you write a poem about a sea shell?
Hand out and read “I Am Stuck Inside a Seashell.”
What are some other shapes that a poem
could be written in? What if you were writing about a bear? The moon? A star?
Read “We’re Perched Upon
a Star.” How else could the author have written it in a shape?
Write “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on the board in star shape.
Who knows what infinity is? What does
it look like? Hand out and read “I’m Caught Up in Infinity.”
Do these poems rhyme? Do they have
to?
Ask students to write their own rhyming or
non-rhyming shape poems.
Poems/Resources:
Various poems by
J. Prelutsky (It’s Raining Pigs and Noodles)
Objective:
Students will write a poem about a color that uses some form of metaphor or
simile.
Materials: writing
notebooks, pencils, poems
Procedure:
Ask students what their favorite color
is. Why do they like it? Are colors only something to see?
Read the “Colors live” poem from the end of
Hailstones.
Ask students what the color red makes them
think of, feel, see, or otherwise sense.
This is what it makes one person think of
when she thinks of red. – Read “What is Red?”
What kind of images did she use
there? What did she compare red to? Did she say “it is like” or “it
is”? Is red really those things? Why? Talk about
metaphors and why poets use them. How do we use them? Eg, “She’s a
real tiger.”
Is white a color? What do you think
of when you think of white?
Hand out and read “What is White?”
Ask students to write their own poem about
color that shares what they think that color symbolizes, sounds like, feels
like, etcetera.
Poems/Resources:
Hailstones and
Halibut Bones (M O’Neill)
Objective:
Students will write about what they are thankful for, gearing it towards a
specific audience
Materials:
Procedure:
Do you ever share what you are thankful for
at dinner on Thanksgiving? What kinds of things do you list?
If a young cousin asked what you were
grateful for, and your grandparent asked, do you think you would tell them
different things? Why or why not? What about one of your parent’s
friends, or someone on TV?
We are going to write about who and what we
are thankful for today using a special format. When you write these
things, remember your audience. Who will it be? (the
class) So if you’re thankful for your dog, Sparky, make sure you don’t
just say “Sparky,” because this audience won’t know what you mean.
Introduce the format to be used.
Once students have listed three or more
things in the correct format, they may complete the project:
Trace and cut out colored paper handprints
Write what you are thankful for on the prints
Cut out a turkey body
Glue the prints to the turkey for a tail
Finished turkeys may be posted in the room
for the day, and taken home that afternoon.
Poems/Resources:
Writing and Art
Go Hand in Hand, page 67
Objective:
Students will evaluate their poetry and publish their best one
Materials: writing
notebooks, pencils, lined paper, construction paper, glue, scissors
Procedure:
What are some ways that you can publish
writing? What have you done before?
We are going to publish some of our writing
by making a hall display.
How do you think you can choose your best
poem? What are some things that you could look for?
Students choose their best poem to
revise. They must check the words that they don’t know how to spell and
conference with a teacher before they publish.
The revised poems are written neatly on
lined paper. The paper for smaller poems may be cut to fit after it is
copied. They then glue it to the color construction paper of their
choice.
Students who finish faster may publish more
than one and/or do some free writing.
Assessment: Check
that the students have correctly revised their poems and neatly published their
original work.
Modifications: All
students should have something written; even the two identified boys who
are taken out during this time in the afternoon probably have gotten one or two
written. If they haven’t, they can use the time to work on writing poems.