Celebrating Poem in Your Pocket Day!

This week, our class shared the joy of poetry with the rest of the school at assembly. We will be celebrating Poetry Month all month long and Poem in Your Pocket Day on Thursday, April 18. What is Poem in Your Pocket Day, you ask? Well, here is how Noio4 explained it at Assembly: Poem In Your Pocket Day Presentation.

To get ready for our presentation, I modeled how I would get ready to do a presentation. First, we made a list of the information we needed to share with our audience. Then, we thought about the best ways to share that information. Here’s our planning document:

Poem In Your Pocket Day Assembly Plan:

What?
What is Poem in Your Pocket Day?
I Why do Poem in Your Pocket Day?
How do you participate? Directions.
Date?
History/Background
Different tools poets use.

How?
Slideshow
Show favorite Poetry books.
Share Poems.
Put parts on cards.
Demonstration.
Make it into a poem using line breaks, repetition, and rhyming.

One of the ways we’ve been celebrating Poetry Month is by reading, Love That Dog by Sharon Creech. In that story, Jack, the main character, is reading and reacting to poetry in his class. So far, we’ve read poems with Jack that include rhyming words, line breaks, and repetition. You may recognize some of the poems like, “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost. The students wanted to use some of the tools that poets use in their presentation. I hope you noticed our line breaks and repetition. We decided to share rhyming poetry during our demonstration by sharing two beloved Shel Silverstein poems.

Another way that we’re celebrating poetry month is reading and sharing favorite poems with each other. I invite you to share your favorite poems with your child. Here’s a great resource: Academy of American Poets. *I gave you the link for the Poems for Kids section, but there are a lot of other great poetry resources for your own celebration of poetry if you want to explore.

Happy Poetry Month!