My Kindergarten poets are excited to share their first poem that hatched this year with the world! It was a fun adventure, combining our love of poetry with developing research skills and addressing science content knowledge.
The poem we were studying this week was Amy Ludwig VanDerwater’s Every Day Birds. In Kindergarten we love our poems short and sweet so we are able to memorize them or read them ourselves. For our study we focused in on just the first stanza.
Blue jays are one of our every day birds in Room 1. Many of them visit the feeder outside our classroom window and they are certainly loud and bold!
We wanted to learn more about Blue jays, other than the fact that they are loud, blue, and a bit intimidating to smaller birds that also like to visit us. We did a bit of research on PebbleGo, one of our favorite kid-friendly databases that our school subscribes to.
First we came up with a list of body parts or key identifying features. Next we added words explaining their role or importance to Blue jays.
Here’s where the poetry midwifery, as Amy herself once referred to it in a conversation, comes into play. The teachers pointed out a pattern that they noticed — identification, movement, eating. We proposed a few line swaps, and…
TAH DAH! Kindergarten poetry magic. As you can imagine, our poets are proud as, well, Blue jays! They are looking forward to illustrating their personal copies of the poem which will go into their poetry folders. They can’t believe their work will be sitting right next to Amy’s!
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Wondering and Wandering 