Poetry & Chrysalis

Students celebrated poetry by reading poems, writing poems, performing poems, and carrying poems in their pockets for National Poem in Your Pocket Day on April 30, 2009.

First grade students are raising at least three monarch butterflies that I shared with them from my own family's butterfly rescue project. We harvested the eggs from a field in Jackson. You can read more about it here. As of Thursday, they had one chrysalis, one large caterpillar, and one smaller caterpillar that still has some eating and growing to do. When I poked my head in the classroom on Thursday, students were reading Eric Carle's classic book The Very Hungry Caterpillar (which turned 40 years old this year) to their tiny friends. I love this.

At our last Reader's Theater Club meeting for 2009, students shared their "pocket poems," and divided into small groups to read, analyze, and perform sets of poems from This is Just To Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness by Joyce Sidman. This is one of my favorite recent books of poetry for children, and Sidman is one of my favorite poets.

The students in the Reader's Theater Club have been a joy! This was our last meeting for the year. We have had lots of fun, laughed, experimented, dramatized, tongue-twisted, pantomimed, read, discussed, read with expression, read some more, and acted a little silly from time to time! What could be better?