Groundhog's Day and Poetry

Groundhog's Day is one of those holidays that just sneaks up on me. I'm swamped in curriculum and am ready to start heavy units like the Explorers but will find a way to work the Groundhog in somewhere.

One place that seems to work well is in poetry. I love that poetry is short and manageable but hits so many of my language arts and sometimes content objectives. We'll be looking at how good writers vary their sentence length using this poem. Lots of long and stretchy sentences in this one. We will look at this poem with both our reader's and writer's eyes. We'll highlight pizzazzy writing like the description of the "leafy bed" and the word "glorious". Here is the Sentence fluency target we are trying to hit. We refer to these posters all the time! We'll definitely work on reading with fluency with this one. Some expression too as the groundhog is speaking throughout this one. Good poem for reviewing the quotation mark.

Here is the poem and follow up. As shown on the picture above (different poem) my students cut the poem off and glue it into their analogy and add their own illustration and labels or captions. The follow up is filled out and graded by me.

Poem Groundhog

Please feel free to use this one. Comment or email if you get a chance to let me know so I know if people want me to keep posting the poems. I do one almost every week. I can start posting them once a week if people want them.