Painting Poems

One of my favorite poetry activities is painting poems.  We spend a lot of time thinking and planning our poem.  Then we get to paint.  The kids use their mental images to create their pictures.  As their painting, the adults go around the room and have the kids talk about their paintings.  We listen and emphasize the language we hear them using.

 

 

 

 

Once the paintings are dry, we start the writing portion.  After working on poetry for a month, the kids really start to get the hang of it.  Most kindergarteners like to write list poems.

Today, we had the fifth graders help us type our poems.

The fifth graders acted as our writing coaches.  They helped the kindergarteners with the layout and formatting of the poems.

The finished products are hanging in the hallway, between the fifth and kindergarten classrooms. 

The paintings are beautiful.  The writing is beautiful.  The experience was beautiful.

Simply beautiful.

More From Our Poetry Unit

We shared many poetry books during our poetry unit.  Here are a few favorites from kindergarten kids.


I love this book because it shows how poems can be written about anything.  It is also a great book for young kids because their homes are things all 5 and 6 year olds know a lot about.  They have schema and background knowledge of their homes.  When they think about their homes, they immediately have mental images.  After reading this book, kids had many new poetry ideas.

This book tied in very well with our work on the 5 senses.  It was also a wonderful model for how writers use their senses to describe.

We wrote poems together.  This was written as a whole class.

Yesterday I shared our poems and paintings.  Here is the display in our hallway.  It is so colorful and makes me smile every time I walk down our hallway.  Each child picked their favorite poem, had it typed, and painted a picture to match.  They are absolutely stunning!

Many kids in the class really connected with poetry.  Often, kids will finish an art project and then ask if they can write a poem to go with it.  OF COURSE THEY CAN!!!  Art is such an inspiration for poetry.  Do you share poetry with your kids?  Ask the children's librarian at the Lynnwood Library to help you find a few poetry books that your 5 or 6 year old will enjoy.  I guarantee they will love the books you find!

Sensory Images and Poetry

We have been writing poetry in kindergarten.  We don't write the rhyming kind of poems. Those are much too challenging for kindergartners.  We write free verse poems and just write our thoughts and ideas.  To help get our thoughts going, we try to engage our senses.  We talk about things we feel, see, smell, touch, and taste.  Last week, we were able to engage all of our senses as we made rolled sugar cookies in class. 

I have to say, I think the tasting part was our favorite!  During our writing time, we used the sensory chart we had created to help us brainstorm a class poem.  Here is our rough draft.

When we are writing poetry, we talk about the difference between a phrase and a sentence.  We decide where to put capitals and punctuation.  We also make changes in our poems as we re-read.  Writing poems as a whole class is always interesting.  You never quite know what you are going to get, or the direction a class will take a poem.   I will be sharing more of our poetry work in the coming weeks!

Happy writing!