Poetry Friday.
An Interactive Poetry Notebook.
Earlier, I shared a post about my interactive poetry notebook: Poetry Notebook: Day One. In this post, I’ll share pointers for Day Two.
Whereas Day One is about listening–letting the poem flow over you–and visualizing, drawing, sketchnoting, Day Two is about noticing and learning about words. It begins, however, with sharing our sketches from Day One.
DAY TWO
Outline of the work on Day Two, from my Interactive Poetry Notebook Workshop
Teaching Tips
Point 2
Time spent choral reading the poem each day for a week has a positive cumulative effect on student reading skills.
Points 3 and 4
Students love to share their drawings with each other in small groups and then whole group under the document camera making them large on the big screen. It’s so exciting for them to see their work on the big screen. The teacher guides the conversation so it is purposeful: to develop reflective thinking, to support student drawings with textual evidence, to grow schema about words in general and specifically.
Point 5
My picture from Day One with word labels added on Day Two. We focus on words used in the poem during our labeling. Also, words that can be inferred from the poem can be added. For example, the word “clock” could be inferred from the words “The best part of the day.”
Points 6 and 7
This is a page from my notebook with teaching points for a couple words I’m pretty sure most students will consider either new or as having a new meaning or use. These teaching points should align with state standards, district curriculum, and your class goals for vocabulary development. Students enter the word do one or more of the following things: illustrate the meaning, write a synonym or simple definition, write a meaningful sentence with the word. Or if you are using vocabulary word maps with your students, they can create one on this page for one of the words. There are many different ways to create word maps; click here for a basic one that is easy for students to create on a notebook page.
Point 8
We attach the copy of the poem (distributed in point 1) to a page in the notebook. Notice that I’ve scheduled this at end of our session. This is a management choice. By making it the last activity, the gluing becomes part of our transition out of our poetry time.
After some trial and error, I finally figured out a way for my students to paste the poem into their notebooks so it can be easily accessible without turning pages as we write about it on other pages the rest of the week. I print it with a border for pasting. Students paste it on page 1 along the left side of their drawing so it can be flipped out. When flipped out, it can be read even when the notebook is closed.
Interactive Poetry Notebook is one of my popular professional development events.
COMING: Day Three, Day Four, Day Five.
Dori at Dori Reads is hosting
the Poetry Friday Roundup today.
Join us there! Thank you, Dori!
Poetry Friday Schedule: 2017 January – June.
Poetry Friday Guidelines
More about Poetry Friday
If a writer pretended they were teaching a class to themselves and did the exercises, I think it would be a valuable exercise. Probably taking one class a day to start your writing or maybe finish a day with would enrich personal writing a lot. I know teaching always helps me learn! Thanks for sharing this process today!
Lots to think about in both these posts…thanks, Alice!
So glad you came by, Heidi.
I love all the learning and sharing going on with this and seeing how you lead your students deeper and deeper into the poem and their own learning and writing.
Thanks for the peek into your process. I do love that drawing of the kids sprawled on the rug. Enjoy. Happy Easter.
There is so much to love about these lessons, Alice! Giving kids opportunities to “notice and learn about words” isn’t a luxury, but it sometimes feels that way. And I agree that reading and rereading poetry daily is such a powerful practice. Thank you for sharing this process!
So glad you stopped by, Catherine. I appreciate your comments!
No longer in the classroom, Alice, but I enjoy the approach you use in examining poetry. Students often do not see how many layers can “be” in a poem.
🙂 Thanks, Linda.
Love that glimpse into the magic.
🙂
Thanks for the Poetry Notebook peek. I’m going to try them with my students next year. I’ll borrow some of your ideas to use with some of Tara Smith’s ideas. Thanks!
So glad you can use some of them. Day 3, we notice and learn about the crafting (genre, form, literary devices, figures of speech, etc,), Day 4, we write a short answer response to a question that requires textual evidence, sometimes pairing with another text. Day 5, we recast the poem to prose, write another stanza, or compose a poem using the poem we studied as mentor text (imitation). Depending on the schedule load or the length of the poem, we might do a poem in one week, or stretch it over two weeks. Also look at my reply to mbhmaine just before your comment.
Alice, thanks for generously sharing your poetry notebook process. I had high hopes of incorporating poetry regularly when I moved from first grade to fourth grade this year. How did it go? Let’s just say at this point I’m thinking about how to improve this for next year! You’ve given me some wonderful ideas.
You are so welcome, Molly. Be sure to read my reply to MaryLeeHahn on this post, as I shared ideas for the next three days’ work. I can see incorporating ideas / poetry from Sylvia & Janet’s books (You Just Wait and Here We Go) into this 5-day work structure. And remember 5 days could be over 2 weeks or 3 weeks or each month–depending on how deep the last three days go and the grade level. Some of the teachers I’ve worked with on this incorporate some Dinah Zike style foldables to put student work into the notebooks.
Thank you for sharing your poetry notebook routine with us. I enjoy seeing what other teachers are doing. My Kindergarteners and I study one poem each week. We revisit the language of the poem each day and illustrate a printed copy of the text. Each child’s poem goes into their notebook to be revisited again and again…and they do!
You are so welcome! K teachers use my notebook ideas, adapting them appropriately. I do something different than most teachers with the drawing (illustrating) part. I orally read the poem (once or twice); then, without discussion and without seeing the words, students draw what they have visualized during the reading. This really develops listening skills and visualization. I set a timer limiting how long they can draw. That was on Day One.
As someone who’s dipping their toes into teaching creative writing (after years of doing little but grammar drills and exam preparation), I’m following this series with avid interest!
Did you see my post on Day One? One of the most important things you can do every day is the free write. With younger students, I don’t do a strict free write. I usually give them a starter stem. Here are a few starter stems: “When summer comes, . . . ” or “My friend is . . . ” or “When it rains, . . .” If they want to change the tense or the verb, they can. Sometimes their free write is a web of words and phrases or a listing that they then sort. Oh, and we never share our free writes on the day we write them; in fact, we don’t look at them until they are two weeks old. Then we mine them for gems. 🙂