April is Poetry Month

April is my favorite month of the school year because I have the whole month to focus on a topic that I love to teach...poetry. Many people think that children dislike poetry. Often even the children themselves. In fact, children love poetry, because children love music. Songs are poetry set to music. It's lyric poetry. Here are a few things you can do. 1)Start off your unit by listening to a song students know and love. Stop the song just as they get into it, and watch them continue on without the background. 2) Allow them to take the lyrics to a song, and perform the song as spoken word. This can be tricky, because you want to be sure the lyrics are appropriate for school. 3) Allow the students to write raps to perform for the class. 3) So choral readings with rhyming books like Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom 5) Use Audacity(Win), or Garageband(Mac) to create sound recordings to convert to mp3. 6)Use Adobe Premiere to create videos to animate student poetry as they narrate. These videos can also be converted to play on almost any computer or mp3 player.

If you need a little more guidance to get you started, here are some sites I can recommend. If you know of some good sites for finding poetry or lessons, share them in a reply.

• Education World http://www.education-world.com/a_special/poetrymonth.shtml
• ReadWriteThink http://www.readwritethink.org/calendar/calendar_day.asp?id=478
• Poets.org http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/41
• Teachnology http://www.teach-nology.com/teachers/lesson_plans/language_arts/poetry/
• Poem Hunter http://www.poemhunter.com/
• Poetry4Kids http://www.poetry4kids.com/

This is one of my favorites

Voki.com is a free online tool that allows you to create speaking avatars. Those avatars are stored online and can be shared in various ways. I like to use Voki to create announcements for my students when I am absent from school. I embed the Voki into my class site and the Substitute directs my students to go there. I would usually say hello, tell them why I was absent and that I had left assignments for them to complete with the Substitute. They always seemed to be nicer to the Substitute if they knew the information was coming from me.

Web What?

Web 2.0 is the second generation of web development. When the Web first began, at least for us regular folks, it was a one way street. You could go to a site and find out information based on what that website owner wanted to tell you. You didn't have a choice as to what you wanted. Now, with Web 2.0, you do. When you go to a site, you can ask for what you want. You can make comments, search databases, and make requests. You can even add your own content that others will see when they visit. You in essence become a co-creater. Check out this video on Web 2.0.



Interested in dabbling in a little Web 2.0 yourself? Well you probably already have, but here are a few things I highly recommend. If you have a Gmail account, you already have access to Google's extensive line of products. You can simply use your Gmail username and password to login. Create a blog at www.blogger.com, you're looking at one right now. Don't have an Office suite on your home computer, you don't need one, you can use Google Docs. Google offers online document creation for free that includes word processing, spreadsheets, forms and presentation software. You can even share and collaborate with others and Google saves it all for you online, so you have access to it from where ever there is an Internet connection. Are you into pictures? Well Google has a free software called Picasa 3. Picasa is a free downloadable picture editing software plus an online picture album that you can share with others if you choose. If none of what I have recommended interests you, feel free to search and find some applications you might like. Here are some links.

Google products
GO2WEB2.o Applications