Bio Poems - with art and photography thrown in.

One night a few weeks ago, I was trawling through Twitter when I came across a tweet from the principal of Auroa School in Taranaki, @macca24129, tweeting a link to a blog of one of the classes at his school.  He was celebrating some beautiful work done by Mrs Ericsson's class, Room 6.

So I went to have a look at this blog to see what Mr Chittenden was celebrating, and I was inspired.

So right at the outset, I would like to say thanks to Heath for tweeting out this blog, and thanks to Alidia for blogging some fantastic work and inspiring my class and I.

And here is how my class made this idea our own.  Firstly we got big pieces of A2 paper.  We folded them in half side to side, top to bottom, to find the centre point of the paper.  Then we ruled lines diagonally from one corner to another to make a big cross.

I asked the children to make big, bold patterns.  I said that we would be painting our backgrounds and that fiddly patterns would be difficult.  It is still amazing how many kids don't listen to that instruction though.

The day after I put out some very brightly coloured paint:  red, yellow, orange, light blue, light and dark green, purple, pink.  The children got to painting.  I asked them to paint the background to their patterns first so that any smaller bits could be painted 'in front'.  At the end of a couple of sessions this is what some had achieved:

I really love the bold bright colours and how each pattern is different.  You may notice one that is different in the photo above, a green and yellow painting with an orange starfish in the centre; this one was done by an ORS child, so looks a bit different.  He loves painting though, so this was another opportunity to include him in the mainstream class programme directly.

Meanwhile I was also working with my kids to write their Bio Poems.  When I first started teaching, oh so long ago, I bought a fantastic book of Poetry Patterns from the Scholastic Book Club that I have used ever since to teach poetry.  It has so many different types of poem in it.  I have blogged about some other poetry structures I have used from this book before including Sneaky Poetry and Walking Poetry.

Each week my class and I have a poem of the week.  So the other week our poem was Becky's Bio Poem from the Poetry Pattern book.

Each night the students take their Poetry Book home as part of their home reading and each day we look at a different aspect of the poem.  I have the poem up on the ActivBoard and they have their books.  The children use their copy in their books to complete the activities and I mirror it up on the ActivBoard and at times the children come up and use the ActivBoard too.

 

The first day we focused on the vocabulary that the children are not familiar with.  This is an opportunity for them to practice their dictionary search skills with a partner.  Our dictionaries are extremely well used in my class.  They are using their knowledge about alphabetical order, their skills in using guide words to help them locate a word, and then reading the definitions of the words they are searching for.



 

 

The next day we were looking for verbs.

 

 

The next day we looked at the lay out of the poem and some of the punctuation.  This was really about the choices the poet was making as they wrote.

 

And on this day I asked the children to identify all the words ending in 'y'.  This lead to a discussion on suffixes and prefixes.

 

During this week we also began writing our own version of the poem.  I also used the ActivBoard to demonstrate this.

 

 

After students had finished writing, they typed their poems up in an A3 Publisher document and printed out plain black and white copies.

 

In the meantime the children did some touching up of their backgrounds, adding paint to cover the white gaps and sharpening the edges with pastels.

 

The next step was for the students to take photos of each other.  I demonstrated using the camera as it is still a fairly new tool in our school, asking the children to take five photos of the person they were photographing, the first one being a photo looking upwards.  I then downloaded the photos and printed them out in black and white.  My first attempt the children and I decided that the photos had come out too small, so I printed them again.

 

We cut out the pictures and the sentences of the poems and glued them on.

 

 





These children are pretty stoked with the outcome and I love how much colour these posters are going to bring to my class.  I can barely wait for the parents to see them!!

Walking Poetry - follow up from Camp

This piece of poetry was inspired by the Karangahake Gorge - the Tunnel and Windows Walk.  My poem (pictured below) is written slightly different from the model, because (if you have read my earlier blogs) I didn't do the walk.  We've also added in some extra parts because I wanted my students to use all their senses in this poem.

 

            

 

 

In the childrens' camp books we did a mind map using our senses to explain the Windows Walk.  We filled out this mind map the evening of the day we went on the walk in the Karangahake Gorge.  Back at school, the children photocopied their mind maps from their camp books and glued them into their draft writing books.  Above right, you can see the mind map I did in my camp book that I photocopied and put in the modelling book.  As we began to write the poems, I encouraged the children to look at the photos from the walk to help them add to their mindmaps if they were a bit sparse.

In my wonderful book on poetry there is a poetry model called Walking Poetry (see the photo, above left, of the model photocopied into the modelling book).  And this married very nicely with what I wanted to get the children writing.

 

        

As you can see I modelled writing the poem in the modelling book.  You can see that I have highlighted parts of the text in my draft and that often corresponds with text I've highlighted in my mind map and model.  I did this so I could specifically highlight nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs as I taught and we wrote, to enable the use of strong verbs and descriptive language.  You can see that I demonstrated rewriting if I wasn't happy with what I had written.  There are places where I have changed my mind about the word I'd used.  You can also see where I was stumped for a rhyming word, so I have brainstormed a list of words that rhyme and then decided on the best fit for the poem.  These skills were explicitly taught as I had students who struggled with writing.

I wrote my WALT and HWIK based on the model glued into the modelling book above, but as you can see I've tried to tell the students more explicitly what I expect in their poems from the picture below.

The origninal poem we modelled from only has three verses, but as I said above, I wanted my students to use all their senses in this poem.  Consequently we added in two more senses.  I also really wanted them to convey to the reader the mood/feeling/atmosphere of the Windows Walk.  And we strongly focused on adjectives and adverbs as these really help to describe the senses and atmosphere for the reader.

When it came to publishing the poems I asked the students to choose colours and a border that reflected the place and time the poem was about; consequently they have used muted blues and greens as it was a bush setting and the day was drizzly.  The pictures in the background were taken on the walk and we published it in Publisher, put the picture at the back and washed it out to get a watery feel.  Putting the title down the side was effective use of space.  We learnt a variety of new ICT skills in Publisher to achieve some of these effects - putting picture to back, using the washed out tool in picture format, using WordArt titles. The poems were trimmed around the border and mounted on a pale green or pale blue A4 coloure paper, and the finished display has a patchwork effect.