Poetry WBT Style!

I’ve been MIA for a while, but I’ve been busy as ever doing things WBT style! I taught a PD election week for my school on WBT, and now I’ve caught the curiosity of many coworkers! Anyone who has immersed themselves into WBT knows how contagious it can be!

Last week I ended our poetry unit, and I have to say it went so well! I’ve been meaning to blog about it but with moving, report cards and benchmarks around the corner, I’ve been busy with lesson planning, grading, and oh yeah- spending time with my OWN KIDS!

I started out the first week introducing one term at a time and ONLY working on that term. We spent a bulk of time on metaphors and similes, because they always tend to blend the two together as one. My students created a remix to our gestures to them, and now we are addicted . We still have been using similes and metaphors in all we do for reinforcement! (“Give a ten finger whoo as slooow as a slimy snail!”) YES/NO WAY was an amazing way to have students differentiate between metaphors and similes and the QT test was the handy tool to assess if students REALLY knew what they were talking about!
                                                                      

I love using materials that are FREE, so I found THIS worksheet in my search for supplementary poetry activities. I have recently fallen in love with notebook foldables, and students  get into it simply because they have the opportunity to cut and glue for a few minutes! This worksheet wasn’t designed to be a foldable, but with a little resourcefulness I made it work. They cut the worksheet, glued them into their notebooks, and created examples underneath. Even my struggling students created some really great guidelines to refer back to ALL year. 
  

After I’d spent several weeks using the WBT 5 Step Lesson Plan to also teach and review rhyme, alliteration, personification and onomatopoeia, I used state practice tests to show the true power of WBT.   Every question asked something referring to the terms we had learned or already learned (main idea, point of view etc).  They broke out their top WBT weapons and began gesturing as they read the poem to help with comprehension. They also gestured  for EVERY question in order to help them identify and apply the terms in the poem. For every answer, they gave the evidence as to why one answer was correct and  the others were not.  I used many aspects of the Prove It game for these assessments.

As a culmination assessment, I had students write a poem about their family that used at least one example of each poetry term.  Using a color coded key that was posted on the board, they completed their assessment.

Red underline =metaphor
Blue underline=simile
Stick figure=personification
Yellow traced letters=rhyme
Blue traced letters=alliteration
Star=Onomatopoeia

This is a "top tier" example of student work:

I have been doing some exciting things with writing, so I hope to blog about that soon!