Hello guys!

Today I am writing to you in order to share a magnificent activity to work on poetry in the classroom.

As we all know, poetry is the great benefit as it fosters Social and Emotional learning. The students put in practice their imagination to express themselves working with grammar and language itself. It is a different way to work on grammar and identify the different types of words in a nice easy way. It makes you think and reflect about the type of word that you would write about and the reason why you have chosen it, which relates poetry with their real lives and gives meaning to the whole process.

Therefore, poetry gives us the chance to work through scaffolding as they are able to use the language even when they do not have a great knowledge of the vocabulary.

With this activity called Word scramble, students can work in pairs or individually. It is not a complicated task and it engages children to work on poetry. You can find the link below:

What do you need for the activity?

-Cards

-Worksheet

-Rubric

The cards are organized by colours; every colour represents a type of word: verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, prepositions and endings that can be added as (ing, ed, it or the).

Some of the verbs can be classified as a noun so it has two colours.

Also included are some blank colour sheets  so students can add their own words into the project.

There is a rubric so they can assess themselves and the teacher can also score them.

The students can take any word from the cards given and create their own poem. After students create it they feel very proud and they want to share it with the class.

As Betsy says in the video, the students also think about images when they write their poems so you could ask your students to draw and represent the words in a picture.

This way we are working the linguistic intelligence, the visual special intelligence and the intrapersonal intelligence.

This is a powerful idea as you can choose the words that you want. Imagine that you are working the ecosystem with them, then it would be amazing if you use some of the words from the ecosystem vocabulary to work in a cross curricular way. For example some of the nouns in this case could be:  river, chain, animals or herbivores.

The worksheet with the blank in colours simply gives you the structure in order to give coherence to the poem and to follow some rules that you should have previously work on with them in the class.

It is a good way to start working on poetry and to reinforce what they know. Once completed, the children can create the word that they want instead of giving them the worksheet. Or they can create their words instead of the teacher giving them to them.

I hope you like this activity and I encourage you to use it in your private English classes if you can. If you have any ideas do not hesitate to send me a comment.

Lourdes