THIRD GRADE POETRY

I’ve been writing poetry since I was a teenager and maybe even younger. So it was only natural that I would teach my third grade students to read and write poetry. Every month or two, I put up a large paper with a poem on it on the black board or above the windows in the classroom, and I’d have them read and memorize it. They weren’t graded for it and only had to try to memorize it if they wanted to. They had to turn away and try to recite it without looking. During the first few weeks of the year, they had to recite each poem without looking at it, at least as much as they could remember. In the last few weeks of the year if they could recite every poem without looking at it, they got a free book of poetry I had bought through the bonus points I accumulated for the amount of books my students ordered from the catalogs of children’s books each month.

It's a little hard to read, I know.

A few days ago I came across a folder with the booklets of poetry I put together.  My students wrote about different subjects. Because I had blogged recently about insects, I decided to choose this one. The students were new to third grade then. Because the weather was still warm we studied insects and went outside to gather grasshoppers or other insects to study. Insects seemed a good topic to write poems about as well. They didn’t do such a good job of rhyming, but you have to realize they were still very young.

My room buzzed with the sounds of crickets. Each student had a plastic cup with grass and a grasshopper in it covered on top with clear plastic. They were given a little stick with cotton on each end and punched a little hole in the top. One end of the que tip would be dipped into something sweet like maple syrup and the other end into plain water so they could see which end their grasshopper would be attracted to. They all named their grasshoppers, and had the option of taking them home or letting them go outside.  

Another two pages from the booklet

I don’t remember these students anymore. After teaching third grade for twenty years with more than twenty students in each class and sometimes as many as twenty nine, it’s hard to remember these earlier students.  I do remember the ones I taught towards the end of my teaching, though. That is if I run into them. I live in a different county than where I taught.

They;re busy checking their grasshoppers.

Note: My husband had made dividing boards for each group of mostly four or sometime five students and I painted them in different colors for each group. Those with the red dividers were the Red Hot Peppers. Those with the blue dividers were the Blue Crew. Those with the green dividers were the Green Beans, The yellow dividers were Yellow Fellows, the purple dividers were the Purple People, and those with orange dividers were Orange Blossoms. 

These were the Green Beans

At the end of each grading period I had them pick one student who they’d like to sit with and write it on a piece of paper. Since there were always the popular ones almost everyone wanted, and those who weren’t so popular, I divided them and when I told where each one would now sit, I told them even if they didn’t get who they wanted to sit with someone in the group had picked them. As far as I know they believed that.

Have you written poetry as a child?

Have your children written a poem?