Poetry

We've been having so much fun with our weather unit! The other day, we reviewed the water cycle, and I took this video:

Besides weather, we have been very busy writing poetry.  You can't really tell what is on the paper in this picture, but he is writing a bio poem.  They turned out so well! 

 The students had to describe themselves in the poetry framework using facts about their lives, as well as sharing their hopes and fears.  They got to read them to each other.

Today, we learned about haiku poetry.  This can be a real challenge for first graders, but they were up for it! A haiku should always have something to do with nature, so I took apart an old calendar that had beautiful nature photography and hung the pages on the board. After we learned about the different elements of a haiku, each student got to choose a photo that they liked.

This is what the students used to brainstorm about their poems:

 Here's an example of a haiku that we wrote together as a class. The first line always needs to have 5 syllables, the second has to have 7, and the last needs to have 5 again.  We used a picture of a duck to write this one!

It was so cute watching everyone writing and counting their syllables on their fingers! By the end of the day, they were talking like robots from all the syllable counting they had been doing.

In other exciting news, this little creature came to visit our class last week! We almost got to keep the salamander as a class pet, but after some complications he had to be let go back into the wild. It was fun while it lasted!