Live and Learn: Poetry in Third Grade: Poems and Questions

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Poetry in Third Grade: Poems and Questions

Happy Monday!
I have another new picture book to share today.
This one is called, Daniel Finds a Poem by Micha Archer.

I LOVE using poetry in my classroom. I use poetry across the curriculum in science, social studies and even math. My students keep a poetry journal that they glue all our poems in and they create "mind movie" illustrations or visualizations of the poems. We generally will glue a poem or two into our journals each week so by the end of the year they leave with their own illustrated poetry anthology.

So I was super excited to find a book to help me introduce the poetry genre to my third graders this September. In this book, a character named Daniel goes to the park and finds this sign:

He wonders what a poem is and walks around asking the animals in the park.

They each give their response.

The artwork is also done by Micha Archer. Just beautiful!

At the end, Daniel goes to "Poetry in the Park Day" and recites the poem he put together using all the responses of the animals he asked.

How fantastic!

I love that this book hits home the idea that good writers are mindful of their surroundings. These days, kids and adults too, are so distracted....too plugged into devices of all kinds that they miss all that is happening around them. Good writers slow down and pay attention to sights, sounds and feelings. After reading this story, I'm planning on taking my students outdoors to write "Poetry in the Playground". We'll take our writer's notebooks with us to record short lines that tell what we see, hear and feel in our school's playground. We'll come back into the classroom to share and compile our lines to write our first class poem together.

I can't wait to hear what they come up with!

I will definitely type it out and give it to them to put into their poetry journals.

We do a lot of shared writing in my classroom. I feel it really helps my young writers develop their skill in brainstorming, composing, editing and revising.

I created two poetry related pages to go along with this book.

This first one is an eye spy page. We will search and find different types of words within this poem.

This will help my new third graders review past learning and show them how writers use a wide variety of words.

This page can be used with any poem at all. I will keep copies of it so my students can use it for a "Wise Choice" job or for a reading center or station along with a fun selection of poetry books.

Here's another page that I will use when we have our "Poetry in the Playground" Day.

You can find these two forms FREE on my TPT store.

Click the link below:

Poetry Resources

I'm also super excited to say that I've added a new "Pack of Poems" to my store. This one is the fall edition. It contains autumn themed poems and questions. Virginia teachers know how important it is to expose students to poetry throughout the year. It is included in our reading standards and is assessed on the end of the year SOL tests. I have modeled questions to align with those found on these SOL assessments.

You can check it out by clicking the link below: