Poetry and Writing Lists!

Hey yall! 

I'm kind of sad that no one gave me any ideas on my last post about what to add to my reading form!  :( Oh well, I came up with something....

anywhooo!

I wanted to share what my students have been doing lately in our Poetry Unit!

They have been SO excited about their Poetry Anthologies {spiral notebooks}.  I started out the unit having the students just copy poems from collections that I had copied for each table. 

I made sure that they copied the poems EXACTLY as they saw them. So they copied the poem on one side of the notebook, then illustrated the poem on the other.

This went on for about 3 days or so.  most of the time I would give students time to share their poem choice and illustrations.

After those first few days, I had them continue to copy poems but instead of just illustrating, they would respond to the poems.  I had sentence stems written on sentence strips to help them at the beginning with responding. Of course, I am beginning these lessons with modeling it for the students first. 

Once the students got the hang of responding and illustrating, I added in commenting! This is the students' FAVE part! They love getting to comment on each others' poems and illustrations. 

I give each student a sticky note to stick on their two page spread. They all get to move around the room and either write a smiley or a wish on the other poems. 

Smiley= something they like about the poem/illustration.

Wish= Something they wish the author did to the poem/illustration.

At first some students were only writing wishes. I reminded them that they should be complimenting and looking for good things about their classmates' poems. So, to control the wish giving, I told them they were only allowed to write one wish per day. That helped and most students did well with giving smileys! 

Also, with smileys, I told students to be specific. They would mostly write, I like your picture, i like the poem, etc... very vague. I emphasized that they needed to tell WHAT they liked about the picture or poem. They've gotten a little better! 

Now, they are past the copying part and are writing their own poems at the end of each week that we focus on a different kind of poem. They work really hard since they know their classmates are going to be commenting. 

Seeing their faces light up when they read the comments they get is so fun! :) I love seeing them get excited about poetry!

We have been doing this unit for 3 weeks and it is not getting old yet! :) 

WRITING FOLDER IDEAS LIST!

Ok, so I had this created about 2 years ago and just forgot to post it on here! I have a writing idea list that I have my students create and put into their writing folders at the beginning of each year. This is used throughout the year when students seem to get "writer's block". :) When I hear the whiny, "I don't know what to write about" or "I'm trying to think"... I just tell them to look at their lists. This saves me so much time and energy on certain days.

I've finally added it to my TPT store!