I’m at it again, crossing curriculum!
Fit in a poem for the end of poetry month
while focusing on Earth Day! Hopefully
you’ve heard of I Am poems.
They are an amazing way for students to express themselves and are
always a parent favorite.
I enjoy having my students write I
Am poems
because they don’t have to rhyme. Do you
find that while students love rhyming, they get writer’s block when it comes to
writing a rhyming poem? That’s why it’s
nice to teach them about other types of poems.
Writing can be intimidating enough
without the pressure of rhyming. In
fact, I Am poems are really just regular
sentences. For that reason, I love this
writing assignment for my struggling writers.
They write about themselves, one sentence at a time, and practice
writing repetitious sentences.
Here are some finished products and how you
can connect it to Earth Day.
You know all those scrap pieces of paper
that you chopped off of craft prep? SAVE
THEM! I only throw out left over
construction paper if it small enough to be forgotten on the floor.
First, I introduce Earth Day. I usually have a Weekly Reader to go along
with it; this provides great background knowledge for the next part where we
brainstorm ways that we can help take care of our Earth and sing the “Recycle, Reduce, Reuse” song.
Then I bring out our huge bag of scraps and
become all dramatic about not wanting to throw it away. I tell them that I’ve thought of what we can
do to be good stewards of our craft materials and to not let them go to waste.
By this time in the year, everyone but my
artists is so over drawing and I end up with sloppy, half-hearted drawings
anyways...so I challenge them to create themselves with only the scraps of
paper and scissors!
Kids dig through my bag of scraps looking
for their skin color, eye color, clothing, and hair.
You kind of have to get over the fact that
they make a mess of your scraps, but they are so proud of themselves for constructing
a little them out of something that some people consider trash.
Have a Happy Earth Day everybody!
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