Poetry Assignment

Personal Poetry Writing

For the last several class meetings, you have been learning about and writing different forms of poetry:  I POEMS, concrete poems, acrostic poems, found poems, and haiku poems. You also have read about other forms of poetry through class readings and web sites.

Based on your personal poetry writing experiences and your reading about poetry, complete the following assignment.  Be ready to turn in a draft of the assignment next week. You will eventually complete this assignment with your students.

Assignment:

·        Describe a context in which your students are learning about a nonfiction topic such as a person, place, or event.  For example, students might be studying the Civil War or their neighborhood, or they might be learning about mammals or the rainforest.

·        Describe the instructional grouping structure: individual, small-group, whole-class, or computer-based

·        Create a plan for inviting students to gather information about a topic and then to transform that information through poetry writing.

·        You can choose any form of poetry for students to use.

·        Your plan should include a description of a mini-lesson that you will teach to support students in writing a poem with precise descriptions and interesting word choices.  That is, your mini-lesson should take place before writing and should help students become aware of how to choose words thoughtfully in order to create effective descriptions.

·        Be sure to provide a complete reference for the poetry books you will use as your literary models.

·        Develop an invitation and rubric that you will give to your students.

An example follows…

Learning Context

Students are in fourth grade; this is a heterogeneous group of students. They are beginning a unit on the geography of North Carolina.

Plan

·        Review the characteristics of an I POEM by sharing the book Sierra by Diane Siebert. 

·        Make copies of the text and distribute selected pages to students.

·        Ask students to highlight specific words and phrases that convey sights, sounds, smells, or textures.

·        Have students write these words and phrases on chart paper that is displayed on the classroom walls.

·        MINI-LESSON:

Take students on a field trip or walk to a natural setting such as field or creek or wooded area.  Ask them to pick something in the area to become:  grass, tree, creek, soil, rock.  Invite them to sketch the item and to make notes about it.

·        Invite students to create an I POEM about the item they chose.

·        Have them share their poems with a partner who will highlight the words and phrases that make use of interesting and precise words to describe the item.

·        Tell students that they will be able to write another I POEM about North Carolina.

·        Provide the following invitation and rubric to students.

·        After students draft their poems, have them work on revising the content based on the rubric.

·        Then, have students edit their drafts to correct errors in spelling and mechanics.

·        Invite students to illustrate their final poems and publish them in a class book, your class web-page, or you may choose to display them in the local library.

I am North Carolina.

Mountains, plains, beaches,

Rivers, caverns, forests--

Those are what you see.

And those are the very heart of me!

What if North Carolina could talk?  What would our state have to say about its lands and waters?  What would it tell us about its natural features and resources?

Based on your reading of Chapter 3 in the social studies textbook, choose a geographical feature of North Carolina that interests you.  Find two other books or resources to read about the feature that you have selected.  Then, use the information that you have gathered to draft an I POEM. 

You may want to model your poem after Sierra by Diane Siebert. Or, you may use one of the other I POEM models that we have learned about.

Example of Student Rubric

RUBRIC FOR YOUR POETRY ASSIGNMENT

Analysis of Poetry Assignment

      Describe your poetry project. Share any important details and/or observations that may not have been included in your original plan.

      Discuss the impact on student learning or the results of the poetry project.  You may choose to reference student scores on the rubric, student writing samples, observations of, conversations and interviews with students. In other words, you need to provide some evidence of student learning.

      Did your students’ writing improve? How so?

      Are the results different from what you projected? How so?

      Will you continue to explore poetry as a means of integrating other curricula areas?

      Describe the impact this assignment has had on your teaching.

      If possible, take digital photos of your students researching, composing, sharing, and/or publishing their poems. We will share our projects on December 2!

   (15 points)

ENJOY!