Sharing Poetry

In the Grade Two classroom we have been talking about poetry as a unique and powerful form of expression. The students have been learning about poetry devices, including, but not limited to, rhyme, personification, alliteration and simile. They have been challenging themselves to use these in their own writing.

For the lesson in the photographs, the student borrowed lyrics from a popular singer/song writer and rearranged the words to make a new poem of their own creation. The original material was the Sharing Song, by Jack Johnson, and these are a few of the results.

Leading up to this lesson the students had been creating their own free verse poetry. We have been learning how to see the world through the eyes of a poet, to seeing regular things in new and poetic ways.

Instead of a ceiling, we, as poets, see a sky.

To start, the students take little moments from their day and describe them for an audience in new and imaginative ways.

We have also learned how to use line breaks in our poetry. Line breaks are the poets way of telling the reader when to stop and notice special parts of the poem. We use line breaks to help our audience find meaning in our poetry.

To close out this unit, the students will be sharing a collection of their poetry in the form of an anthology, sharing copies of this anthology with their friends and families during a coffee house.