Nature Poets: An Interdisciplinary Science And ELA Unit
My students need multiple copies of Poetry Matters,Joyful Noise, River of Words, magnetic poetry, pens, Creech's poetry books, and Florian's animal poetry.
We need poetry in our classroom. Poetry promotes literacy, builds community, and fosters emotional resilience. Poetry is a written venue that is accessible by all students. I want to take an interdisciplinary approach to our life science unit by integrating it with our poetry studies.
My students are 4th graders who love reading and the arts.
They are highly creative and can take an idea and run with it. My students are a diverse group of kids with a wide range of interests and abilities. They are eager learners and they work well independently and with other students. They are highly-motivated, hard-workers, who will appreciate the benefits this project has to offer.
Though they are for the most part avid readers, few of them are very enthusiastic about poetry. In our classroom, we have a "poeTree" (a large faux potted tree) with a large tub of poems, but unless directed, they rarely read poetry. I would like to help them see that poetry can be as engaging as the prose they typically are drawn to read. Their love of reading combined with their love of science will hopefully allow this project to broaden their reading repertoire. In addition, I think their creative minds will enjoy the composition of poetry and the performance of the poetry for two voices.
My Project
In my classroom I like to mix creative and collaborative projects into the academic curriculum. I would like students to understand the art and creativity of creating poetry that incorporates information during our life science unit. My students will be reading and listening to Sharon Creech's "Love that Dog" which is told from the perspective of a young student who is apathetic toward poetry in his own classroom. We will then study the "River of Words", a biographical work about William Carlos Williams, a poet featured in "Love that Dog". We will use Ralph Fletcher's work. Finally, we will be studying the work of Douglas Florian as a model of writing poems that infuse animal information creatively into the writing. Students will be given options as they explore poetry in centers to use magnetic poetry to create Haiku and Nature poems, "Zen pens" (flair pens) for letting their ideas flow, and perform poems for two voices from "Joyful Noise" to record and post on our classroom webspace.
By taking an interdisciplinary approach to science, writing, and reading, students can identify and apply authentic connections between the subjects and appreciate not only the aesthetic nature of poetic language but also understand that poetry can be used to share scientific information in a creative way.
This project has the potential to be an amazingly rich experience for the students and I look forward to seeing what they create. Please consider helping us!
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