Writing:Welcome to our Poetry Patch!

After 20 something, something, years of teaching, I have learned a thing or two about how to deal with kids and holidays. My philosophy is to tap into the excitement and enthusiam kids have for this time of the year and use it as fuel for learning in the classroom. We are presently working on identifying nouns as a part of speech. So I used noun collection as the springboard for this fall writing activity.

Step one was to have students brainstorm all the people, places and things connected to the fall season. They did this with a small group on poster paper. We call this stage "brain dumping".
Then we taped all these posters up on the wall and I told them we were going to use them to create our fall pattern poems.

The pattern goes like this:

Fall is...

adjective, noun, verb ending with -ing

We wrote our rough drafts on day one. Then on day two we revised.
We made "word choice" one of our writing targets for this writing activity and discussed how poets are very choosy about what words they use because poems are generally fairly short-every word is important. We decided to do the same and took great care in the adjective and verbs we picked. On day three we edited our writing paying special attention to our spellings. We are working on attending to spelling by having another "go" at the spelling and using spelling strategies to help us. More on that another day! They actually published these themselves, boy are they good on the computer this year!!

Here is the final product:
Here is what we are calling our POETRY PATCH!

Kids love creating these frames for their poetry!! Some clever and creative ways to decorate their pumpkins!

More examples of the poems they wrote:

My third grade poets ROCK!

Hope you are enjoying this season with your students!!