Ruth Ayres invites us the celebrate each week. Click over to her site Discover. Play. Build. to read more celebrations.
Join the Chalk-a-bration at Betsy Hubbard’s site Teaching Young Writers.
My students love Chalkabration, the genius child of Betsy Hubbard of The Two Writing Teachers. She invites us to celebrate poetry at the end of the month by chalking poems. Because of Thanksgiving and Christmas break, we have not chalked poems for 3 months. The excitement got us in a little trouble.
I used a poetry lesson I had made a few years ago that I happened upon in my Dropbox folder. The poems were quite sophisticated for my little ones, but my instructions were to find words of light and words of dark. I don’t want Chalkabration to turn into fluffy writing. With this work reading high-level poems, their poems were more thoughtful. I especially like that Erin, a third grader, decided to use the haiku form. Our springlike weather allowed us to go outside and chalk up the sidewalk.
By Reed, 6th grade
A haiku by Erin, 3rd grade
By Margaret Simon
It doesn’t snow here, but even so, my students drew snowflakes to symbolize winter.
Reflections on the Teche 
Gorgeous words, Margaret. I love ‘leaving blue-black night behind’. You help those students do wondrous writing!
Your chalkabration makes me feel that spring is getting closer. In Estonia we can already see a bit of sun, but the sidewalks are still covered with snow.
Oh how I love this!
Wow! Thanks for sharing. I love the line “The leaves are gone but the wood stands bold.” Beautiful.
I love your instruction about finding words of light and words of dark.
This is an awesome idea. I love incorporating poetry into each class, each day, and this is a great idea to celebrate and highlight some of the poems we’ve read. Love the pics!
It’s been some time since I’ve celebrated Chalkabration. Love the poems from your students – the writer’s notebook beside Kielan’s poem, the alliteration in Emily’s poem, Reed’s woods standing bold, Erin’s use of color to show the images for light and dark, your words – “…bouquet of warmth waking the day,” and the snowflakes from students who don’t get snow. We only had a sprinkling back in November, maybe some snow in February instead of rain which is predicted for every day this week.