national poetry month | Jackie Reeve

This Month With 1st Grade: Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant

jackie April 27, 2010 Art, Children's Books, Crafts, Teaching 1st grade, carin berger, Crafts, jack prelutsky, lesson plans, library class, national poetry month, poetry

I really love this book.

I do, last April for National Poetry Month I used it with my 3rd graders. Because April is such a short month for us, we didn’t get very far with it. I love Jack Prelutsky in general, and I decided to give this one a shot with my 1st graders this year (my 3rd graders are still reading Hugo Cabret, so we kind of skipped poetry month to make sure we finish by June). For some reason after beefing up my Prelutsky collection this year I neglected to get Scranimals, which would have been a great companion with this. Next year.

Haiku with 1st Grade

jackie May 6, 2009 Children's Books, Teaching 1st grade, haiku, lesson plans, library class, national poetry month

This was another National Poetry Month lesson I did with first grade. We talked about haiku, and amazingly enough they got it! We learned that haiku usually has 17 syllables–5 in the first line, 7 in the second, and 5 in the third line–and we read Mark Reibstein’s excellent Wabi Sabi. They loved Ed Young’s illustrations and were constantly trying to figure out what was drawn and what was taken from photos. I really wasn’t sure the kids would get this book, it’s very subtle and addressed beauty in simple things. I need to give them more credit, because they got it. And without really being able to verbalize why, they understood that haiku was poetry even though it didn’t rhyme. They just liked the way it sounded, and they understood that it was different from regular lines in stories.

Jack Prelutsky with 3rd Grade

jackie May 4, 2009 Children's Books, Teaching 3rd grade, books, Children's Books, jack prelutsky, lesson plans, national poetry month, poetry

For National Poetry Month in April I did a Jack Prelutsky unit with 3rd grade. We don’t actually have many Prelutsky books in my collection right now, I’ll be ordering those for next year. So because of that, and because April was short due to spring break, we focused on Behold the Bold Umbrellphant, which is a wonderful book of silly poems (illustrated by the wonderful Carin Berger). The kids loved it, and after we’d read all the poems during week 2 of the unit, I broke them into groups and gave each of them an animal. They worked together to come up with their own animal/object hybrids. So I got things like doorilla from gorilla, lionopoly from lion, and umbrellican from pelican. Then I used this resource guide from Harper Collins for our game days last week. The kids did the mazes, alliteration game, rhyming game, etc. Next year I’ll expand the Prelutsky books I use, but this was a great age for this project.

Hip Hop Speaks to Children with 4th/5th Grade

jackie May 1, 2009 Art, Children's Books, Teaching, Thoughts 4th grade, 5th grade, books, Children's Books, lesson plans, music, national poetry month, Teaching

Oh my goodness, I can’t believe how much fun I had in April talking about hip hop for National Poetry Month.

I spent the month using this book to talk to some of my 4th and 5th graders about rhythm, beats, and structure. We looked at poems side-by-side with some lyrics, and we talked about how both poems and hip hop lyrics have a structure. We talked about how the number of syllables in each line needs to make sense with the whole verse or the way it flows will be broken…that sort of thing. We talked about how hard it can be to write a good poem or a good song, and I read them Nikki Giovanni’s introduction in the book. The intro talks about the roots of hip hop, compares it to opera, warns kids not to be fooled by all the embarassing rap songs out there. True hip hop is like poetry. And on and on and on.

Search

Archives

Meta

This Month With 1st Grade: Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant

Haiku with 1st Grade

Jack Prelutsky with 3rd Grade

Hip Hop Speaks to Children with 4th/5th Grade