And here is my final (I think) sharing of poems (tomorrow–nonfiction) from my visit at Wealthy Elementary. With 5th graders, I was doing poems about the Lost Colony of Roanoke. They had just finished studying it, and I had planned a few possible short poem forms to work with. I was thinking we might contrast life in England versus life on Roanoke, or a Native American narrator with a colonist narrator. But with the first class, I realized that we didn’t really have enough concrete details at hand to work on that. So we ended up working on a look at Roanoke from a more emotion-based perspective. With the second and third classes, we took the biopoem form and wrote poems with Roanoke Island itself as the topic. I really love how they connected with the events of hundreds of years ago.
In the padlet below are some snippets of poems the first class wrote, plus a group poem from each of the other two classes. I led them through the biopoem form, and they each wrote their own individual one. But after each line, I called on one or more volunteers to share lines, and I typed those into the padlet live to create a classroom poem. In the third class, which was the very last session of my entire week there, I passed around the microphone at the end and everyone who wanted to (most of them) read a couple lines from our group poem out loud. The class was silent, and it was really incredible. I wish I had video of that reading!
Since them, some of the students have gone back in and added their entire poems–hooray! I’m loving padlets for sharing student work publicly, and I plan to use them again in school visits!
Here is their work, which I think had us all thinking beyond just the facts of Roanoke and into the bigger ideas of peace, the human story, and more.