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/