Poetry Cafe

On April 29, 2011, the second graders at Dunlap Grade School celebrated National Poetry Month with an all day Poetry Café.  Parents and grandparents were invited to join in on the fun by participating in poetry activities with the kids.  The day began with doughnuts and continued with some of the following poetry activities:

Newspaper Poetry: This is where students cut out words/headlines out of newspapers and rearranged them until a poem emerged.

Tanka Poetry: This is a type of Japanese poetry but instead of counting syllables it counts words on the line in this pattern: 2,3,2,3,3.  We wrote these poems about what it would it would feel like to be a kite.  We then decorated kites with our poems written on it and took them outside to see if they would fly.

Performance Poetry: Students (and visitors if they wanted to) were placed into groups and chose a poem to perform for the class.  The groups practiced fluency and created actions to go with their poems.

Concrete Poetry: This type of poem is where the meaning is suggested by the arrangement of words.  Students created a picture using words instead of lines. 

Magnetic Poetry:  The day ended with making our own magnetic poetry by finding words in magazines and attaching them to magnets!

We even had some of our visitors share poems they had written.  The Poetry Café really helped students’ practice authentic writing, develop a purpose for writing and share their writing with a real audience.  It also reinforced our literacy series genre study of poetry.  It was great to see so many families participate and help empower our students to excel in a global society. 

~Stefanie Pitzer and Stacy Lingenfelter~