Students from 12th grade recently visited the library to share original children’s poems with girls from 4th grade. They based their work on examples by Shel Silverstein. As you can see, both the 4th graders and 12 graders had a great time, and created some fun and original work. Details about the project and more pictures are below.
Introduction: Read several Shel Silverstein poems together on the projector. Notice the way the pictures and words interact to give meaning to the poem. In pairs, take 10 minutes to create a new poem in the style of “A hot dog with everything on it” or “Hinges.” We made sure to evaluate how rhyme plays a critical role in the poem “Missing.” And after a dramatic reading of “sick” by their teacher, students had to create an original drawing to show as many details as possible from the text. (Here is the slideshow with the poems!)
Then students had three classes to complete a gallery walk with the poems from this Shel Silverstein website resource. They were posted around the room with different media (write the concrete poetry on dry-erase boards, butcher paper for writing and illustrating the Epigrams, filling in the blanks for the Rhebus poem on the glass windows, etc.) and in this way students worked with partners to learn about and create one example for each type of poem.
Then students had two classes to brainstorm and create three different types of poems to share with the 4th graders, choosing from the types we had seen in the gallery walk. During our “Poetry Party” they each had to share one poem with the big group, then we divided into small groups where six 4th graders worked with a pair of 12th graders to interpret the rest of their poems, and then illustrate those poems or create their own with colored pencils and paper.