Poetry Notebooks

Every year we work on poetry notebooks as part of our writing/reading time.  This is the first year that I feel like we've really gotten into it and the students have really gotten good experience both reading and writing poetry.

Each child gets their own poetry notebook. This is just a spiral... Nothing special.  Each poem is glued on the left side and students illustrate a picture on the right.

Ms. West is in charge of these wonderful notebooks and she does a terrific job! She starts with the students when they are ready... Usually by the end of first quarter.  Every Monday, a new poem is added to the book. At first the poems are used to find rhyming words and sight words.  Students also make illustrations to match their poem.

Many of our kids struggled with rhyming words this year until we started working on our poems. Each poem is posted for the week and we recite it daily. 

As the year goes on the poems become more interactive where students are adding things to the poem or responding to the poem.

Here is a winter poem about snowflakes but we also worked on number words.

This is a poem for Groundhog's Day. Students wrote a sentence to make a prediction about the groundhog seeing his shadow.

By third quarter students start to create their own poems. Here are some Valentine's Day poems.

During our Dr. Seuss celebration, students made a color poem to go with the story My Many Colored Days.

                           
                           

Students also made their own onomatopoeias to go with Gerald McBoing Boing.

  Today in celebration of spring, students made a spring poem.  You can see them illustrating a picture to go along with their poem!

Seuss on the Loose!

This week in our building it was spirit week in honor of Dr. Seuss and Read Across America! Here are some of the Seuss activities we did this week!

Make a Poster- Gerald McBoing Boing 
Each classroom was asked to sign up to make a poster for the hallway by choosing their favorite Dr. Seuss book. Our class signed up for Gerald McBoing Boing.

We read the story and learned about onomatopoeias. Each student made their own onomatopoeia and we took their photograph to show them making their sound.

We made our graffiti background by using paint mixed with water in spray bottles. We sprayed them on a big canvas outside.

 We took a picture of each group of children making sounds like Gerald and some of the students wrote the words in bubble letters.

 A few of the students wrote an excerpt from the story.

The poster was displayed in the hallway with some of the onomatopoeias and the book.

Opinion Writing
Writing opinions is a kindergarten standard so we wrote one about our favorite Dr. Seuss story. Students choose one of 5 books and then wrote why they liked that book. Then they created a replica of the book cover.

Cat in the Hat

Of course we made hats to wear and we made a yummy Cat in the Hat snack using wafer cookies, vanilla icing and pull and peel licorice.

Classroom Learning Activities

For our phonics activities each group did a different activity. Ms. West's group read The Cat in the Hat and made Cats in Hats by choosing a word family, making words and writing a sentence with a word from their family. My group read Green Eggs and Ham and practiced rhyming words. We played a memory game with green eggs and then wrote our own version of the story using rhyming words.

 For math we read Ten Apples Up on Top and worked on addition. We played a partner game to practice solving number sentences. Students would solve the sentence their partner held up by using their fingers, drawing a model or using counters.

It was a fun day for all!