Poetry Journals

Several weeks ago, Babbling Abby of The Inspired Apple fame, first introduced her poetry journals (I've linked you to a recent post where she goes into more detail how she uses them in her classroom).  I LOVED the idea of poetry journals.  I am not much of a poet, so this was a way for me to introduce my kiddos to different types of poetry by better poets then me!

During the first week or so of school, I set up a poetry "bedazzling" station.  I gave each child four minutes to use as many different stickers as they wanted to decorate the front of their poetry journal...a boring old composition notebook.  Here is one example.  I appologize for how it looks, I scanned the images into my computer because my camera batteries were dead.

Every week I find a new poem and write it on chart paper.  The poem will usually go along with what we are learning in Science or Social Studies.  We work on reading the poem all week.  On Fridays, we write the poems into our journals.  I model this in my own poetry journal using my document camera.  We then illustrate our poems.  Sometimes we simply draw a picture.  Other times I might print off a picture for each child to use.  This past week, we worked on a Fall poem.  So, I brought in leaves and we did leaf rubbings.  Here are the poems that we have worked on.  The first poem was actually from our reading series.  We were reading a story about ants, and it included an ant poem.

The next week, we worked on a fall poem:

For the next week, we worked on a caterpillar poem and then drew the life cycle at the bottom (she kind of got a couple pieces switched around, but you get the idea).

The next week, we were studying Patriotic Symbols.  So we worked on a poem about the Libery Bell:

Our poem last week was another autumn poem.  This is the one that we illustrated using leaf rubbings.

I was worried at first, that the students would think that it was too hard writing on regular lined paper.  But, for the most part, they have done a great job.  I figured that this would be an awesome way to show how their handwriting has improved throughout the year. 

This has become one of my favorite times of the week.  My kiddos, now seeing that we illustrate in different ways, are always excited to see how we are going to decorate our poems.

Does anyone else use poetry journals?  If so, how do you use them in your classroom?

Have a happy Monday!