Poetry Publishing

Red Eyed Tree Frog from Ginger Mason on Vimeo.

Rain Forest Animal I Poems from Ginger Mason on Vimeo.

Reflection on Shared I Am Poem
3/21
After completing the shared nonfiction book we began our unit on poetry. I began by reading aloud as many I Am poems as I could find on the internet since I did not have any poetry books that included them in my classroom. I had the students point out to me what they noticed about these poems, and they quickly pointed out that each line began with the word I. We then looked at the template for writing an I poem, and I explained to them how to go about writing one.

3/22
We began our class I Am poem on an animal from the Rain Forest. We chose to complete our class poem on the Red Eyed Tree Frog because it was an animal that we already knew something about, and we also had some questions about it that we wanted to explore. We began by researching our animal and answering the questions we had.

3/23-3/25
We wrote one stanza each day for our class I poem. I explained each line of the poem to the students before we began writing it. We moved through this process rather slowly since we had to vote on just about every line. Some of my students wanted to write something about the tree frog being eaten for each line so we had to continue to reference other I poems to point that different information was used for each line.

3/28
I chose four students to record our digital I poem. My lowest reader read aloud the title of our poem, and then I just pulled names from a jar to choose the other three. I had planned to allow each student to read aloud a line of the poem for our digital copy, but this did not work out since I chose to use Photo Story to publish it with. If I had used powerpoint or some other type of media I probably could have made that work.

3/29
I played our class poem for the students today. They were just as enthused as they were when the saw the class nonfiction book.