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Posts Tagged ‘gifted writers’

Winter Chalkabration

Posted in Celebration Saturday, Chalk-a-bration, Writing, tagged , , on January 31, 2015| 6 Comments »

Discover. Play. Build.

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.

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.

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By Reed, 6th grade

By Reed, 6th grade

A haiku by Erin, 3rd grade

A haiku by Erin, 3rd grade

By Margaret Simon

By Margaret Simon


It doesn't snow here, but even so, my students drew snowflakes to symbolize winter.

It doesn’t snow here, but even so, my students drew snowflakes to symbolize winter.

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Falling into Poetry

Posted in Poetry Friday, Teaching, Writing, tagged , , , , , on October 25, 2013| 13 Comments »

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Finally in the deep south the temperatures are cooling off. Everyone is putting out their decorated pumpkins and synthetic spider webs. Halloween is around the corner. Time to write some fall poetry. I introduced fall poetry by posting Amy Ludwig Vanderwater’s poem “Preserving Fall” on our kidblog site. Her poem is about pressing leaves in waxed paper. I remember doing this as a child and with my own kids, but my students have never done this. We are going on a field trip today to Natchez, Mississippi where there may be more colorful leaves to collect. I promised we could press leaves next week.

FOREST COVERwrite a poem

In the meantime, I shared Amy’s book Forest Has a Song. We picked out favorites to read aloud. From JoAnn Early Macken’s book Write a Poem Step by Step, I asked the writers to use a cluster method for gathering ideas when pre-writing. I like how clustering can bring forth words you may not find otherwise.

One of my clusters turned to my backyard satsuma tree, full of ripening fruit.

Satsuma Time

Look outside the kitchen window;
First sign of fall,
peeks of yellow,
sparkle like diamonds
ripening in the sun.
Heavy hanging on the tree,
Abundance gathered one by one.
Satsuma sweet,
Autumn citrus treat.

–Margaret Simon

See more Poetry Friday at Live your poem with Irene Latham.

See more Poetry Friday at Live your poem with Irene Latham.

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