April is National Poetry Month, as every good English educator knows, and I wanted to celebrate by sharing my students’ work. Those are the best kinds of posts, right? Seeing the culmination of your instruction and their hard work is inspiring!
For this particular project- Poetry Project: Exploring Poetic Forms– the students choose from a list of different poetic forms and write an original poem in that form. They also choose a symbol or image they think works well with the poem to illustrate it. Let me show you what they came up with this year:
Y’all. I have some seriously talented kids, huh? They could choose from well known forms like a sonnet or villanelle, but there were also lesser know forms like the gwawdodyn, kyrielle, rondeau, cascade, or the bop. Their poems had to be at least 12 lines in length and had to include three poetic devices in the poem that they underlined. There is a place on the rubric for them to label what each poetic device is, and each one had to be different from the others.
I get a ton of great work from my kids, but when they have to create something from scratch, they can really blow me away with their inventive and creative abilities. I’m just being a proud teacher and bragging on my kids in this post, so I hope you think they are as awesome as I do!