Task: Students write an acrostic poem about the fall season.
Step One: Read a few poems.
As I have said before, if you want kids to write well, they
should constantly be exposed to high quality literature. Select a few fall
themed poems for the kids to read aloud. Discuss the imagery and other poetic
features of the poems. Ask kids to circle all fall words.
Step Two: Create a word bank on the board of “fall” words.
I like to categorize the vocabulary list that is generated.
This is what my class came up with:
FOOD: crops, pumpkins, squashes, corn, nuts, turkey, pies,
apples, pears
COLORS: red, orange, yellow, brown, scarlet, golden
ACTIVITIES: basketball, football, Thanksgiving, Halloween,
harvest, cooking, families celebrate
NATURE: hibernate, migrate, leaves change colors, leaves
fall, shorter days, cooler weather, mist, breeze, squirrels gather nuts, seeds,
acorns
OTHER: Autumn, season, changes, scarecrow, thank you
Step Three: The first draft.
I displayed a model of an acrostic poem I made up using the word
AUTUMN. The poem was written with colored markers on a 12” x 9” sheet of white
construction paper. Around the poem I made a border of leaves in the colors of
fall.
I said:
You are now going to write the first draft of your poem. After
that I’ll help you fix your mistakes and then you’ll do your final poem on
construction paper which you’ll decorate with fall pictures.
It is extremely important for you to be proactive in order to
get your students to produce high quality writing. Be specific about what you
require of them before they begin.
Because I have a class of enthusiastic writers I tend to take
more risks than I would if I were teaching predominantly English language
learners.
My instructions were as follows:
Choose a fall word for your acrostic. Can you give me some
examples?
I created a list of their responses: leaves, harvest, pumpkin,
autumn, Thanksgiving, celebrate
You may use one of these words, or a different one if you
prefer. For each letter, make up a line that tells something about fall. Would
“Fall is fun?” be a good line?
They shook their heads. “Why?” I asked.
They couldn’t tell me, so I explained that it gave me no
information about fall at all. It was too vague. Besides, it showed no thinking
or use of imagination.
Another important thing to remember is that each line must have a
different idea. If you mentioned leaves in one line, you cannot talk about
leaves again. Do you all understand?
Before you get started let’s quickly look at our chart of
“banned” words.
I asked the kids to suggest synonyms that they could use and
displayed their responses on the board.
Banned Word
Synonyms
Fun
enjoyable, wonderful
Nice
excellent, pleasant, helpful, kind
Great
superb, extraordinary,
splendid
Good
Bad
unpleasant, awful, dreadful
I must point out that I’m not fond of adjectives that aren’t
specific and helpful to the reader, but eight year olds are not ready to understand
this. However, making them think harder about their words is an important step.
Note: If I had a class of kids that struggled with writing
tasks, I would give them the word for the acrostic poem. I would probably also
do the first two lines together with the whole group, then have them work
independently on the rest.
Older students (4th and 5th grades) should focus on fine tuning
details. For example, pin down the shape, color, texture of a specific leaf
from a specific tree and write about it so that your words create a photo of
the image in the reader’s mind. Make it more real. Hold a microscope to
whatever it is you are writing about.
