Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Carole Gerber’

IMWAYR
Visit Teach Mentor Texts for more of the Monday reading roundup.

Springtime means reading poetry in my classroom. I put out all of my poetry books. I haven’t counted, but they fill an 8 foot table quite nicely. For today’s It’s Monday: What are you Reading roundup, I wanted to share a new favorite poetry book.

SeedsBees

My students, especially the younger ones in grades 2-4, enjoy poetry for two voices. Seeds, Bees, Butterflies, and More! includes poems to be read by two people. I love cuddling up with a student and reading poetry together. Each poem is illustrated beautifully and the text is written in two colors for the two readers. Erin and I read “New Shoot” together and were surprised by the ending when the bunny will eat the new leaf. Matthew and Vannisa loved “Helianthus” and wrote their own poems featured on my blog yesterday.

Pansy and Poppy VBPL

I love when poetry comes together with reading aloud and learning science. This book combines the joy of choral reading with the learning of new facts about seeds, bees, butterflies, and more! We even learn that seeds are dropped in bird “doo.”

Read Full Post »

Please use this button on your site for DigiLit Sunday posts

Please use this button on your site for DigiLit Sunday posts

Tweet with #k6diglit.

I have had some struggles with using Haiku Deck in my classroom due to the network blocks on our server. I’m sure this is an issue for others as we use new apps in our classrooms. I found a way this week to make it work. The server blocks the images, but not the app. I taught my students about fair use of photos from the Internet. We search images on Google, click on Search Tools, and click on Labeled for reuse. This limits greatly the number of images we can choose from. However, when using a web-based app, I feel it is important to use the images rightly.

The poetry writing exercise included a discussion of imagery and how scientific poems can use imagery to help your reader understand a concept. We looked through poetry books and found model poems that used imagery. We read together the poem Helianthus from Seeds, Bees, Butterflies, and More! by Carole Gerber.
“If saying ‘helianthus’ makes you cower…
use our common name–
Sunflower!”
Vannisa chose to write a haiku about sunflowers. She actually wrote three haikus, so I told her that a long poem using the haiku syllable count is called a Choka.

Vannisa Choka Sunflower

To see the full poem on Haiku Deck, click here.

Inspired by Carole Gerber’s big name poem, Matthew wrote about Charcharodon Carcharias or Great White Sharks. Matthew managed to work in a line he lifted from the book he is reading.

Matthew shark poem

Matthew’s full poem is here:

Read Full Post »