The Silly and the Serious Sides of Poetry

Week 29


This week our little ones learned about Jack Prelutsky, the high-prince of silly poetry. Primary students learned about personification, and Upper elementary worked with poetry terms. 


PreK 3, PreK 4, Kinder: Guiding Questions - Who is Jack Prelutsky? How can we add to poems to make them even funnier?

JackPrelutsky.com

We met Jack Prelutsky via his fun website. We read some of his funny poems by choosing different animated animals and objects. 


Kinders also added to some Prelutsky poems to make them even funnier. From New Kid on the Block, we read "Bleezer's Ice Cream" and then brainstormed other icky ice cream flavors of our own (Vanilla Tomato sauce Fish soup!). 


See more ways to use Prelutsky poems here.


Grades 1 & 2: Guiding Question - What is "personification" and how can we show we understand how to use it?

"Describe the train as if it were a person"
(photo from Flickr)

We learned that personification is when writers give human characteristics to non-human things. We read some poems that use personification and then generated some ideas of our own.


Using these pictures, students came up with human qualities to describe and re-imagine each item. 






Grades 3, 4, 5: Guiding Questions - What are some common poetry terms? How does understanding these terms increase our appreciation for and understanding of poetry?

Two hard-working terms-investigators

We reviewed basic poetry terms such as repetition and end rhyme and more complex ones such as alliteration and onomatopoeia using this Power Point. 


I read various poems aloud from a favorite anthology, Talking Like the Rain, and students tried to see which terms they could identify in each poem. 


Next, they paired up to find examples of the terms in poems using other anthologies, marking them on a Poetry Bingo sheet. This activity really showed how well students understood the terms and allowed me to work 1-1 with those who needed more help.