"Breathe In Experience, Breathe Out Poetry"

This week, we've been acquainting ourselves with poetry while simultaneously becoming poets. Toward the beginning of the week, we read some poems together as a class and talked about how poets view objects through a poet's eye. While we may look at items and view them as scissors or a marker, a poet would view them as a shark waiting to pounce on its paper prey, or a fraction of a rainbow.

On Tuesday, we put on our poet lenses and headed outside to experience nature as poets. We walked across the field and down the trails, writing down all of our sensory experiences--what we heard, smelled, saw, felt, and even tasted! 

When we returned to the classroom, we talked about how writing a poem is very similar to writing the small moment stories we wrote at the beginning of the year, as it is about a small, detailed moment in time. So, we worked on turning our nature walk into a small story. 

Later in the week, we read our stories aloud and thought about how to make it into a poem by creating line breaks. Poets are very purposeful with the way they write their words on a line, and we listened to where we thought a line break would belong in our writing. We also took out words like "and" and made that a new line! 

Part of our homework this past week was to go on a poetry hunt. On Friday, we shared our poems with each other and talked about why we liked them! Some of them reminded us of scenes from our favorite seasons, some had great rhymes, and many of them made us laugh :) 

We are excited to continue on our poetry journey in the weeks ahead