Water Poetry

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Home : 2003 : October : 23

Water Poetry
By Heidi

My kids loved when i taught them about Onomatopoeia (NOt sure if I spelled it correctly). It is a poetry technique where the author used words that actually sound like a sound effect. I tolk kids to think about comic books.
They read WHAM! and what other sound effects do they recall? I started by brainstorming on the board, then asked them to choose one example of Onomatopoeia and illustrate it as if it were to appear in a comic book. I only gave them a small half page to so it in, but it also had to be colourful and designed to represent the sound it makes. (warm up)
Next, I introduced the idea of

water sounds. We talked about what it might look like to have a shape poem about water too. (I made one of water going in circles as it heading down the drain for them to see on overhead.) We brainstormed, and I read a couple of poems with words like trickle, drip, drop, splat, gurgle, etc. The kids then worked on creating a water poem, as creative as they'd like.

I set it up as a PIG activity (which my administrator loved) by drawing a cute PIG head on the board. They get very excited to do PIG activities because they get to decide whether they would prefer to work with a Partner, Individually, or in a Group of no more than 3 (PIG). Do this a few times before observation so they get really used to the routine and get psyched about seeing the PIG... it's good for show!!!

I let them go anywhere in the room to work, in a whisper, with the condition that each group had to produce one water poem that they would share. The kids were loving it, very engaged. Then we took the time to share the poems with the class. We typed them up during a different class time and made a big bulletin board display of them with a blurb about Onomatopoeia.