Poetry with 4th Graders

[Karyn J. Powers]

I recently spent a morning writing poetry with fourth grade students from Hawthorn Hills Elementary School. My goal was to get them to give their senses a voice. Mother Nature cooperated with a beautiful day. We began outside with a five-senses scavenger hunt. Seven teams of five went out to the playground to "collect" and record what they saw, felt, heard, smelled and (imagined) they tasted.

Their task was to write down the best description of their sense-by-sense experience before we returned to the class room to construct five-line poems. The teams recited their poems and then as individuals, each constructed another five line poem using the best lines that they heard or new lines that were triggered by the readings.

Forty kids from the same school, out on the same school grounds they have seen every day for at least the length of this school year, created forty unique poems.