Poetry Stations

I just love it when I offer a lesson in the library and when it's over, the teachers ask, "You'll have this for us again next year, right?"  This happened multiple times last week after 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th grade teachers brought their students in for some poetry centers that my colleague, Natalie Watts  and I created.

Both of us are hosting Poetry Alive and we wanted to promote some of the poems they would be performing.  Instead of just reading them to the kids, we came up with about 10 centers that would introduce the poems to the students and require them to complete various activities as they rotated around.  

Here are a few examples of our centers...  After reading "Ode to Family Photographs" by Gary Soto, students looked at some pictures that I had saved of families together.  The directions were to find a picture that reminds them of a time with their family and write a poem about it.  The students came up with some very clever poems.

At another center, students read the poem, "Be Glad Your Nose is on Your Face" by Jack Prelutsky.  After reading the poem, they had to illustrate in DoodleBuddy on the iPad either a place described in the poem or a place on their body where they would not want their nose.  

Not all stations were technology based.  At one stations, students read the poem, "The Pig" by Roald Dahl.  Then they used highlighters to find text evidence answering certain questions.  For example, highlight with green the line in the poem that tells how the pig solved the problem.  Adding the highlighter made this an engaging activity for the students.

Yesterday, we had our Poetry Alive performance and it was great to see the recognition in the students' faces when one of the poems from our stations was performed.