Poetry Music Project

I made this poetry project my first year teaching and after three years of using it, I have made all the necessary improvements within the project and to teaching it to the class.  I start by sending home this request for parents to either find a song with their children or to have me work with the child to pick out a song.  I always read over the song for language, appropriate content and enough figurative language.  Click on the picture and you can get to the document.  Most families do this part with their children.


In fourth grade, the students cover most of this figurative language so in fifth grade I review the topics in minilessons.  Every day for two weeks I have a brief lesson to review that form of figurative language.  All of the links are embedded into the document
below (the picture is the link to the full document.).  Once I teach the lesson and go through the link or links, they look at their own song to find that element and color code right on the printed lyrics using crayons or colored pencils based on the table.  I go to the computer lab several times within this period also so they can copy and paste the song into a Google Document, share it with me and color code it in the document.  As part of this process we review copy and pasting along with formatting rules.  At this point, I have also shared the project with them.  I share it with them as a view only so they can revisit the links if there is any confusion.  I also allow them to play the games that are linked in the document.  

In this two week process, I go over rhyme, chorus and different types of poetry.  We use a writing journal daily with the front being their personal writing and the back being the lessons taught.  I have them take notes on several types of poetry in the back and in the front they try to write this type of poem.  I started this year with limericks.  The notice the five lines, the humorous content and the AABBA pattern for both rhyme and syllables.  Again, I go to some different sites for examples; I often use Giggle Poetry and Poetry for Kids.

Once the two weeks are over, I correct the found figurative language. The documents have been shared with me through Google Docs. I use the comment feature to ask guided questions to help students find the remaining figurative language. Now, they can go back, use the comments and find the missed figurative language.

This year, I teamed up with a fourth grade teacher. I gave her a list of the songs and she had her students choose from the list. This guaranteed every fourth grader a partner. They started the lessons and finding the figurative language in their class while we continued on to the next part of the project.

As the fourth grade was learning and searching we were reading our lyrics, thinking about our figurative language and getting ready to explain. The children were asked to explain "the story" of the song and what it means to them. I then show my write up of the song Bubbly by Colbie Caillat. I review the formatting rules along with the needed icons to support successful keyboarding. I review our rules for dead words and teach a mini lesson on how to find our own dead words.

Today, I did my lesson on "How to Find and Replace Dead Words".  I had the students use this as the title for the notes they put in the lesson section of their daily journal.  First, I put up the paragraph below:

Today I took my big dog for a long walk.  My dog seemed happy to be outside.  We passed a little kitten.  My dog was happy when it saw the kitten.  After we played with the kitten we went to the park.  While at the park my dog swam in the cold water.  He was sad when it was time to go home.  My dog and I ran fast all the way to our house.  My mom had a big glass of lemonade ready for me and a cold bowl of water for my dog.

I read it out loud to the class making sure to yawn alot.  We then talk about what makes it so boring and circle them within the passage.  The children brought up words used more than once, dead words and boring or overused words.   Having made the Dead Word list already made the idea of replacing words simple.  While spending the year to develop the differences between editing and revising clarified that this process is for making our writing more interesting. 


After going through how to find our words, we review strategies for replacing them.  The children immediately call out some of the replacement words which fits in to my first method; we call it 'using our own vocabulary'.  We then think about a grammar lesson from the beginning of the year - proper nouns; we call this way 'being more specific'.  Then we look back at the Dead Words poster.  Next we tie back into the Six Traits by revising for word choice.  And finally, we review using a thesaurus or Snappy Words.  The actual notes the students took are listed below. 

The children are amidst their poetry projects right now.  This lesson was targeted to apply to the writing piece explaining the story of their favorite songs using the already located and color coded figurative language.  They have already written the story and what the song means to them or how the song makes them feel.  Today's independent practice for the taught skill was to find five words within their written pieces to revise using the taught strategies.