May

I truly loved our last classroom visit to Celeste's classroom. This sparked a lot of new ideas for the third grade team at Greenacres, who were just gearing up to launch a short poetry unit. Celeste's use of Grant Snider’s Poetry Comics gave us so many ideas! Her lesson encouraged students to closely observe and analyze the visual and structural elements of the text. This thoughtful integration of visual literacy and poetic analysis sparked meaningful conversations and served as a powerful model for us moving forward.

Jaime, Kristen, and I promptly shared what we learned with the rest of our team. One idea that our colleague Taylor Kreamer had was to let the students have some fun with homework.  Students were asked to take inspiration from Poetry Comics and create their own comics at home.  See assignment below. 

Poetry Comic Project: 

• Read the attached comics from the book Poetry Comics by Grant Snider 

• Create your very own poetry comic! 

  • You may use blank paper or the provided comic templates

  • Your comic can be one page or multiple pages

• Your comic must be:

• Neat 

• Organized

• Colorful

• Something you're proud to share!

The students loved this project and they put a lot of time and effort into their work!  See some samples below:

I also brought the Poetry Comics book to share with our first grade buddy class, who is also an ICT classroom.  Although they have not been immersed in poetry yet, the younger students loved reading and discussing the comics as a group. They especially loved the "Springwords" comic, below.   I created this mentor, "Seasons," for them to use as inspiration to create a joint third grade / first grade buddy comic:

Another way we have incorporated play into our poetry unit is a mystery mental image game.  After teaching a lesson about how readers of poetry make mental images as they read, students chose a poem in secret to illustrate.  

Poems for Mental Image Mystery Game