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!