I think that I shall never see/A poem as lovely as our poetree

We've been busier the past several weeks simply getting ready for this month than we have in a while, I think. There have been lots of fun and unique things we've been able to do. Let me start with our poetry month planning!

Back before spring break, Carrie and I started planning Poetry Month and what exactly we were wanting to do. One thing was for sure--we needed to be as punny as possible and create a poetree. A poetree is basically a paper tree, either three dimensional or not, where kiddos can hang up poems they made or teachers can hang up famous poems.

Thankfully we have some very creative and flexible parent volunteers who were able to take our crazy idea and make it so. Here they are building the tree:

We never thought we would run out of wall space after our redesign so quickly. I'm happy we have pictures and color on every single wall, including our new "wall of fame" as I've been starting to call it. Anyway, here's the finished tree + some really cute kid poetry from our fabulous students.

I made the cloud banner up top to let people know why on Earth we have a tree in the library, and was going to make a kite with the most famous tree poem ever on it. There has been very little free time for me to do this so the wall is as kite-less as it ever was. Still looks pretty darn good to me, though. If the font on the clouds looks familiar, its a dupe of Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham font, which can be downloaded at my favorite website dafont.com. A lot of times I will try to copy the font by hand, which does not always turn out so well. I need to take a hand lettering class this summer!

Since its Poetry Month, the kids have been working on different types of poems. Shape poetry has been fun for 1st and 2nd grade and Kinder and Pre-K have had fun with sensory poems. The best part is they're really being good about not eating the candy or taking the smencils.

Black out poems are challenging and force kids to think outside of the box. Our 3rd and 4th graders are currently working on those, with passages from Harry Potter and Whatever After. We tried to pick things they might already know about but that has good vocabulary. They also can use the newspaper if they prefer, though it is far more time consuming.

It's been a lot of fun. I was reading somewhere that you shouldn't necessarily save all your poetry for April. Exposing kids to a variety of literature, including a variety of poetry, early on is important to their development of being a reader and a creative thinker. Maybe we can incorporate more poetry into regular lessons next year, but for our schedule, Poetry Month it is.