Poetry Assignment

Personal Poetry Writing

For the last several class meetings, you have been learning about and writing different forms of poetry: 

Free verse poems, 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 with your students. This is the only assignment that you are required to complete in your classroom. If you do not have access to a classroom, talk with members of our class who are practicing teachers.

Assignment:

• Describe a context in which your students are learning about a nonfiction topic such as an animal, person, place, or event.  For example, students might be studying Pirates, communitities, WWII, or they might be learning about animal life cycles, landforms, or the rainforest.

• Describe the instructional grouping structure: individual, small-group, or whole-class.

• Create a plan for inviting students to gather information about a topic (research) and then to transform that information through poetry writing.You may choose any poetic form.

• You will include a "shared writing" plan where you compose a poem together, with your class, before students engage in independent research and composition.

• Your plan will 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 independent writing and should help students become aware of how to choose words thoughtfully in order to create effective descriptions.

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

• You will take your students through the writing process. Please describe how you will publish student work and provide evidence of students' published work.

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

 Read this information about the instructional scaffold for writing informational poetry.

Here is an example of a poetry outline. Please note I have not written the "lesson plan" rather included an outline of what took place.

For a comprehensive view of the project, check out Maria Blevins 3rd graders: http://marialoveblevins.wordpress.com/poetry-class-assignment/

Ashley Wright's 2nd Graders:

http://wrightas.wordpress.com/poetry-assignment/

Angie Sigmon's 3rd Graders:

http://asigmon.wordpress.com/poetry-assignment/

Kari Harrington's Plan, Invitation, and 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 will reference student scores on the rubric, student writing samples, pre/post tests, observations of, conversations and/or interviews with students. As you provide evidence of student learning, think about:

Did your students’ writing improve? How so? You will need to code your students' poetry samples; in other words, you may look for evidence of the following:

• poetic language (i.e., exaggeration, onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, unique punctation)
• vivid verb choice
• informational content
• rich descriptions

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

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

      Describe the impact this assignment has had on your teaching.

      Take digital photos of your students researching, composing, sharing, and/or publishing their poems. We will share our projects during our last class meeting!

(25 points)