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I asked the group about a week ago ways to introduce poetry to their elementary 
group. I am very lacking in poetry skills as when I had to go to school we were 
required to MEMORIZE it and COPY it into a notebook.  This left me with permanent 
poetry impairment scars.  Here are suggestions I received from you gentle readers:  
Thanks for all the suggestions

Jan Cole
LMS
Horace Mann Elementary
Duncan, OK  73533
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Have a look at the links at
http://www.shambles.net/pages/staff/poetry/
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Here are some ideas that I use:
In Second Grade I pair poems with stories for the first 10 visits or so. 
Each week the kids read the poem, talk about what they notice (rhming words, 
patterns, etc), divide the poem into parts and read ala choral verse. The 
poem I choose matches a story I'm going to read. We end up with a booklet of 
poems that they pretty much all can read. We have one session at the end 
where they choose their favorites to reread. I gather the poems together,add 
a cover and and they take it home. For eg: a sports poem from the book 
Sports! Sports! Sports paired with a story that features the same sport in 
some way. They are beginning readers so I start with simple poems and throw 
in some more complicated ones later. This week we were reading the book 
"First Day in Grapes" So I copied two poems about the first day of school. 
They will read both of them and then decide which one fits the book better.

In third grade the kids do a project with particular animals so I ask them 
to read some animal poems, or find their favorite animal poem to practice 
reading and share with the gorup. We compare the style and look of the 
poems. You could also compare the information about the animal in the poem 
with information found elsewhere.

In fourth grade the classroom teachers have a long poetry unit so it's easy 
for me. The unit involves the kids choosing a poet to research, write out 
three of his/her poems, write a poem in that poet's style. So I begin a few 
weeks earlier and put out poetry books in stacks by author. The kids have to 
choose a stack and read poems by one author, then the next week they must 
choose another poet and so on, in order to expose themselves to different 
styles. They they are better-prepared to select a poet. They we look up 
information about the poets in the Junior Book of Authors, encyclopedias, 
etc. to help with the classroom research.
I'm thinking of having Poetry Alive come to the school for a presentation 
sometime. I've had Kristine OConnell George and Janet Wong come to the 
school. That would make it easy to just read their poems in preparation
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Check out the book A Kick in the Head, which shows various types of poetry, 
has an example of each, and some lovely collage art on each page.

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Hi - I love poetry and found some pretty fun things to do with it  I called the 
unit/lesson "A closer Look at a Poetry Book" - I memorized "Smart" by Shel 
Silverstein - (i didn't memorize which book it's in) then I took each piece of 
money in the poem and glued velcro to the back - I did the poem with a flannel 
board or with my Book Props Apron.  Also I memorized "Mother Doesn't Want a Dog" 
from Judith Viorst's book "If I Were in Charge of the World" and at the end I 
pulled a snake in a can out of my pocket and opened the can........it was fun and 
it encouraged more than a few kids to look closer at the poetry section in the 
library.
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Here is a great source for some poetry lessons, including a complete unit on poetry 
writing by the master poet himself, Jack Prelutsky. I've used the unit with third 
graders myself, and it was very helpful.

http://teacher.scholastic.com/lessonplans/results.asp

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Use Silverstein and Prelutsky books--including Rolling Harvey Down the Hill and 
Runny Babbitt.
Both poets have some websites for some additional ideas.
Nonsense poetry can be loads of fun.
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I really enjoy teaching concrete poetry.  There are books full of concrete poems.  
After we look at some together, the students create one.  They are really cool.

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Have you checked the archives? Last year I think there someone who talked 
about cutting up really good poems (with scissors) into words and phrases to 
make seeds for poems, and then the students created poetry from the seeds. 
It was a really interesting idea.


So I checked the archives and found this:

I teach a lesson about found poetry using cut strips of white paper in a ziploc 
baggie and 100 of my favorite poetry books. I tell the kids that today we're going 
to grow poems; they already know I'm weird so this news does not phase them in the 
least :-) So then, I talk about if we wanted to grow apples, what would be needed? 
Finally someone says apple seeds. I pose the same questions with oranges and 
pumpkins. They've got the pattern down now and easily respond orange seeds and 
pumpkins seeds. Then, I say, what do I need if I want to grow poems. Some free 
thinker (every class has one... hard to believe with NCLB and standardized testing, 
but we haven't killed

them all yet) will respond poem seeds. I ask what are poem seeds. Someone will say, 
words. Then, I remind them that poets don't just use any words; they use the right 
ones. Then, we talk about where we find apple seeds (inside apples), where we find 
orange seeds (inside oranges), where we find poem seeds (inside poems). Then, I give

everyone a baggie of blank strips (about 100 strips... that's about five pieces of 
plain white paper cut into 20 strips/sheet per student) and a stack of books. They 
use a pencil to go through the books of poetry and collect seeds for their own 
poems. They can copy words or phrases-- one per strip (front side only). I do some 
samples

from a poem on the overhead so that we practice getting strong words-- good quality 
seeds. Then, they work. Every once in awhile, I'll issue a challenge to the room 
like, "Good poets often have questions. Find a question to write on a strip." or 
"Find a color word that isn't the basic box of crayons." or "Find five strong 
action words

(verbs)."

Once they've collected seeds from lots of different books, with me all the time 
stressing to find things from Shel Silverstein and Robert Frost, Jack Prelutsky and 
Naomi Shihab Nye, they lay all their strips out face up and begin to find the 
magnetic words... the words that stick together. They write their own found poems 
this way, and

they're always very good. The funny thing is though that they end up reading an 
awful lot of poetry before they write their own poem. They even read poems that may 
be too sophisticated for them because their reading to find words not symbolism. 
They sometimes will become more sophisticated readers through this experience, 
however. I'll

never forget the fourth grader who I overheard tell her friend, "You should use 
this Sandburg guy's book. He's a really good poet." It made me giggle that she 
thought she was discovering Sandburg's genius until I remembered that she was 
discovering it for her... in the fourth grade! :-)

After the students grew their poems from their seeds, I then did some art history 
with them about collage and we created collage art to complement their poems. The 
teachers hung these up in the hallway and the principal wanted to know how the kids 
wrote such sophisticated poetry. The kids told my principal, "Ask Ms. Rod. She made 
it

seem really simple. We could teach you if you want, but good poetry and good art 
takes time. You can't hurry. You can dig a hole in an hour, but it takes eons to 
create the Grand Canyon." I just had to laugh. I didn't think they had even heard 
the analogy. I was wrong.

The nice side benefit of this lesson however was that the circulation of my poetry 
section increased exponentially. So much so that the teacher asked me to limit the 
number of poetry books her kids could check out because that's all they wanted to 
do in class is read poetry. What a lovely problem to have! :-)

 

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http://www.cis.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1991/4/91.04.06.x.html
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1994/2/94.02.02.x.html
http://shelsilverstein.com/indexSite.html
http://www.gigglepoetry.com/
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Prairie/7537/984anpm.html

Here are some suggested websites I bookmarked from other LM-NETters.  I like 
to use Shel Silverstein poems.  For grade 2  I use Cuttin Kate, and they act 
it out.  For other grades I like to get the audio of Where the Sidewalk 
Ends, so they can see how much inflection and emotion add to poetry.  Giggle 
Poetry (link above) has lots of fun ideas. Acrostic poems are fun to write.

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Have you seen the Shel Silverstein site? 
http://shelsilverstein.com/html/home.html  It links to this PDF document of 
ideas and activities: http://www.shelsilverstein.com/pdf/poetry.pdf

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www.poetry4kids.com

www.inofoplease.com/spot/pmonth1.html

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