Thursday, April 1, 2010

Word Choice in Poetry

In our recent poetry mini-lessons, we have worked on how our word choices and our endings for our poems affect the way our readers experience the poems. Recently we worked together to come up with words that describe and tell about spiders. Then we drew from those words in two different ways to make two different poems. The resulting poems showed us how important the word choice and the end of a poem are. We talked about how a good poem can leave us with a clear picture in our mind and often with clear feelings. Here are the two poems:

Quiet Spider
Quiet spider
Patient spider
Spinning
Weaving
Twirling
Long, thin, silky threads
Making a silvery, soft
whirly, twirly web!
Wow!

Creepy Spiders
Spiders, spiders, spiders!
Creepy, creepy spiders!
Smooth, shiny black widows
Hairy, bushy tarantulas
Crawling on their 8 legs
Crawling and sneaking
Up on me!
Ahhhhhhhh!