Recent Language Group Activities

 

This week the students in Natasha's language group have been exploring poetry.



We began with a journal entry.

The categories students were listing were items from nature, feelings, places and sounds.

The next day students circled the many words that they listed in their journal entries and chose one word from each category.  They used these words to write a poem.

Each student read their poem to the group.

We came up with a name for the five different styles of poetry that students used.

• silly poems 
• story poems
• repeat poems
• imaginary poems
• "describing a moment in time" poems

The students then looked for examples of those styles of poetry in published poetry books and shared their discoveries with the group.

Reading Dear World by Takayo Noda

Finding an example of a story poem by Ralph Fletcher

Reading Dark Emperor by Joyce Sidman

This week Tom’s language group embarked on a two week Illustration Study. Students will study the techniques of a variety of illustrators. The goal is for students to incorporate some of the techniques into their written books as part of our writing workshop. The first book they explored was How to Heal a Broken Wing by Bob Graham, who is both the writer and illustrator. It is the story of a little boy who rescues a pigeon with a broken wing. On another day the students studied the book Hoptoad written by Jane Yolen and illustrated by Karen Lee Schmidt. A third book shared this week was The Sandman by Ralph Fletcher and illustrated by Richard Cowdrey. Each of the books incorporates a variety of illustration techniques. They generated a lot of discussion about perspective from close up, far away, from below and up high. It was amazing the amount of details that the students noticed in each of the books. Tom is looking forward to seeing what techniques each of students incorporates into their written books.

Joan's group has recently wrapped up their Illustration Study and has begun exploring pattern books. We are reading various types of pattern books and noticing the different patterns that the authors incorporate into the text. The children enjoy pointing out and describing the patterns that they notice to their classmates. Next week students will begin to experiment with patterns in the books they are writing.