Painting Poems

This week we wrapped up our poetry unit. The kids really enjoyed writing poetry. It gave them the opportunity to be creative, have a lot of choice in their writing, and relax a bit with the idea of using conventions in their writing and staying in the lines. Poetry is a fun time to think outside the box.

There is a lot of modeling that happens in the poetry unit. I use samples of kindergarten poems from previous years to show kids different types of poems. We read lots and lots of poems, some rhyming and a lot of free verse poems.I also model the process I go through  to write a poem.  In kindergarten, we tend to focus on writing free verse poems. Rhyming poems are hard and we never want writing to be frustrating in kindergarten.

One of our final poetry activities was to select a favorite poem, from our poetry notebooks, and have it typed up. Then each child painted an illustration to match the poem they had written.

There were poems about submarines, flowers, gardens, and (of course) rainbows.

My favorite had to be the poem about the contents of a lunch box. If you have been in our classroom during lunch time, you know that the painting below shows this little girl's froggy lunch box.

Poetry writing was a great experience for our kindergartners. Everyone had the chance to feel successful in writing and we ALL love to paint!