October 5, 2012

Mrs. Hartsock's Reading Group

We spent the week completing a genre study on poetry.  Students learned vocabulary related to poetry (stanza, line, pattern, rhythm, beat, etc.), and about some writing elements that poets sometimes include in poems (alliteration, onomatopoeia, smilies, repeated words/phrases, and rhyming.  We enjoyed reading several poems in our anthologies (and identifying the writing elements/parts of the poems, and read some poems from library books too.  

It was especially fun to break up into small groups and read some fun fall poems as a reader's theater to practice reading fluency and using our "performance" voices.  Students worked together to decide who should read which lines of the poems, and if the reading should include choral reading to make it sound more interesting.  They did a great job!

Planning how to read a poem as a group (it was also HAT DAY for spirit week!)  . . .


Performing for the class!






Students also tried their hand at writing poetry!  The kids wrote acrostic poems, shape or concrete poems, and poems that used sensory words.  They discovered that poetry is fun to write, in part because there aren't really "rules."  Poems don't always use complete sentences or punctuation, and allow the writer lots of freedom of style.


Examples of shape poems

Examples of acrostic poems



No comments:

Post a Comment