Spring Has Sprung Poetry in Elementary Blog Hop

Welcome to my stop on the Spring Has Sprung Poetry in Elementary Blog Hop hosted by Line Upon Line Learning.  My name is Stephanie and I teach 2nd grade in a two-way dual language classroom.  That means my kids are learning to read, speak, and write in 2 languages (English and Spanish).

The kids and I just started our poetry unit.  We started the week focusing on how poets use sensory images to help us visualize when we read a poem.

In Science, in my partner's room, the kids are learning about weather so we focused on topic poems about weather.  The first poem we listened to was about rain.  I had the kids close their eyes and visualize what rain looked like, sounded like, smelt like, and felt like.  Then they wrote a short journal reflection.

They wrote ...
- What was the poem was about?
- Described if the poem used rhyme, rhythm, or repetition.
- Then wrote and drew what they visualized.

I love how she drew a picture of her thinking bubble in the top left picture :).

Then in writing we focused on using our senses to prewrite out a poem.  I gave the kids this little interactive journal flap book and they got to choose one type of weather that they wanted to write about.  Then they closed their eyes and visualized that type of weather.  Lastly, they just jotted down what it looked like, sounded like, smelt like, and felt like.  This was a prewrite, so I always tell my kids not to worry about spelling.  I also explained that "felt like" could also describe your feelings.  Some kids added a heart on top of their hand to represent "feelings".

The next day, after the kids had finished writing in their flap books we started to draft out our weather poems.  We decided to use acrostic poems.  Here is the anchor chart that I created during our mini lesson.

The kids were really excited to get started and a lot of them have great poems.  We are in the middle of the writing process, so the kids still need to revise and edit before they can write their final drafts.

Click on the button below to grab my Senses Flap Books Prewriting Templates.

I working on some weather acrostic poem writing paper and will share it as a freebie on my blog when I'm finished.

Thanks for reading all about how we are using poetry in my 2nd grade classroom.

Click on the button below to head to the next stop in the Spring Has Sprung Poetry Blog Hop.

Michelle from BigTime Literacy shares her favorite collections of poetry and has a wonderful blog!

Also, before you go, I would love for you to check out the post below this one.  I'm hosting an awesome giveaway to celebrate my new blog design.  There are products from 20 fabulous teacher bloggers.  You should go check it out :).