Writing Poetry Activities

Yesterday, I visited with an experienced teacher who was having difficulty helping her second-grade students write a poem. Writing poetry makes children think clearly about the words they use and what they mean. Students have to put words together in special ways to write a poem. And often for young children writing poetry is a way to help them learn the concept of rhyme. The teacher had taught poetry before and had always had a hard time getting students to write their first poem. So I gave the students an interactive writing activity on the computer.


The activity enables students to write without actually writing. The students see most of the words of the poem on the screen. As in Mad Libs, the students fill in a blank in each of the four lines of the poem. But unlike Mad Libs, when they click the blank, they see a group of four words at the top of the screen. The select one of the words and it is inserted into the blank. Writing their first poem is a breeze, but they still have to think about the words and what they mean and how they fit together. Now they are ready to change the words and write another poem!

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