Appreciation and Poetry

May 04, 2012

Appreciation and Poetry

Last week was teacher appreciation week. I certainly felt appreciated. Each day it seemed like there was something special for us teachers. There was breakfast on Monday. Thursday was lunch provided by the Korean and Hungarian moms. Friday was leftover lunch. There were cookies and desserts multiple days. One day there was this amazing tray of cookies and cupcakes in each workroom. They were bakery quality and I knew in a moment that it was the work of one of our amazing administrative assistants.

Take a closer look, each cupcake was personalized for every teacher, teacher's aides, principal and staff member in the school. Of course they were delicious!

My cupcake!

My students also made me feel appreciated. I got flowers a couple of days, some small gifts, and chocolate. (Do you see a common theme here??? Food!)

There are 6 weeks left of school! 24 more days to be exact but who's counting, right? The time will fly by fast. So, what have we been up to in 2nd grade. We are working hard and pressing forward. Behavior has been a little challenging since spring break but I know that can be normal for the end of the year.

4th quarter is a time when I like to introduce my students to poetry and writing poetry. We started out by reading some poems. Classic ones by Robert Louis Stevenson. Modern classics by Shel Silverstein including my personal favorite, Sarah Silvia Cynthia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out. We laughed and enjoyed the rhythm and rhyme of the words. Then we began to look at types of poems to write.

First, we worked on writing alliteration poems. I was sad that I didn't have my favorite alliteration book, Animalia by Graeme Base, here to help me teach. But I managed. My students chose a letter and came up with some fun alliterations. Here's two of my favorites.

"An old octopus owns an orange."

"Herbert the hairdresser has hamburgers on his head."

Then, we began to work on acrostic poems. I talked about how the books of Psalms is poetry that was written in Hebrew but translated to English (or other languages) so that we can read it. We looked briefly at Psalm 119 as an example of acrostic poetry with how each stanza begins with the next letter in the Hebrew alphabet.

My students were excited when they learned that they would be writing an acrostic poem using their names. It was a more challenging activity than some expected and a good vocabulary development activity for my non-native English speakers.