Pass the Poem

I was excited to start poetry with the class.  Poetry gives students an opportunity to explore language, experiment with things like sounds, similes, spacing, repetition, and basically have fun with words.  I began with an activity I call Pass the Poems.  This activity gives the students an opportunity to explore and examine different poems and things that poets do while writing.  By the end of the activity, my goal was to have the students excited about poetry and see that poems are like people, no two are the same.   I began by having the class sit in a big circle and have enough books for each student to have one.  I gave them a few minutes to look through their anthology and see what they noticed.   After a few minutes, I challenged them to be poetic detectives and find different kinds of poems.  Once they found the certain kind of poem, they would hold it up for other students to see.  After every few challenges, we would rotate the books around the circle one spot.  This gave the children an opportunity to see many different anthologies.  


I challenged them to find:  a long poem
                                               a short poem
                                               a skinny poem
                                               a wide poem
                                               a poem that rhymes
                                               a poem that doesn't rhyme
                                               a poem that repeats a word or phrase
                                               a poem that has a different shape
                                               a poem that uses different fonts or sizes of fonts
                                               a poem that leaves big spaces 
                                               a poem that has lines that are written diagonally or vertically

                                               

After we were finished, I shared a few of my favourite poems.  I deliberately chose different kinds of poems.  We ended the class with the children having a few minutes to read and look at different poems with a partner.  They were so excited and eager for me to see and read the poems they had found.  Some were disappointed that I didn't have a chance for them to show me what they had found.  I reassured them that the really great thing was that these anthologies were staying and in fact, we would have weeks to share all these amazing poems.  What more could I have asked for, they were upset it was lunch and that we had to put the books away!!!!