Writing Poetry

1. Writing Poetry In Language Arts Class

2. Poetry Versus Prose • Prose is made up of sentences and paragraphs • Poetry is made up of lines • Poetry lines can be words, sentences or parts of sentences • Lines can be arranged in stanzas • Poetry sounds different • It can be full of rhymes and rhythms • Poetry does not HAVE to rhyme • Poetry and prose differ in their structure. • A poem looks different on the page. • Think of imagery and what you know about figurative language as you read and write poetry.

3. Poem Sketching • You will refer to your sheet “Poem Sketching” for this poetry writing activity. • Look at the words in some of the word groups. How many words can be found in a group? • Next, look at the example on your sheet. Count the number of lines in the poem. Your poem will look like this. • Let’s look at some student examples of poem sketches. (pg.5) • What are your thoughts about these poems?

4. Techniques and Tips for your Poems • Choose a word group. • You can use words in any order. • Words can be in any form. (singular, plural, etc.) • It is OK to add extra sentences that do not contain words from the group. • Let’s work on a class poem as an example! ( write on poster) • When we finalize our 9 lines, we will write them on sentence strips.

5. Revising Our Class Poem • Our class poem will be messy! We are going to change the order of our lines. • We will solve the puzzle together as we look at different placement of our lines. • Lets’ move the lines around until we decide what we like best. • Does the line movement make our meaning stronger? • Is the meaning different? What do we want readers to get from this poem? • Read this version and discuss what you think about it. • We are not done yet!

6. Icing the Cake and Shake it Up!!!! • Icing the Cake- • When you are writing poetry, think about word choice. When you add interesting verbs, exciting and descriptive adjectives and adverbs, you will ”ice the cake” that is your poem. Think of imagery and economy of words…sometimes less is more! We will keep revising until the poem is what we want it to be.

7. Shake it Up, cont. • Shake it Up- Using a dictionary, open it to any 2 pages. Find a new word to replace a word in your poem. Don’t replace too many. You want to find just the right word and make sure the meaning is correct. • Remember, I told you our poem would be messy! • Now, you are ready to choose your word group and quietly start working on your ideas. Follow this process to come up with your own poetry. • We will be illustrating this poem and it will be displayed, so do your best work!!!!

8. Enjoy the Journey!!! • You have learned an interesting and creative method for writing poetry. • I can’t wait to see what you come up with. • We will be using watercolors to illustrate these as our last step.