Natural Disaster Poems

In writing this week I had students write a formula poem on a natural disaster of their choosing. We have been doing a Force of Nature unit all month and I liked how this particular formula poem lended itself to nature's fury.

The Formula:

Line 1: Participle, Participle, Participle 

Line 2: Noun

Line 3: Adverb (how)

Line 4: Verb

Line 5: Adverb (where or when)

The poem I modeled for the students:

Swirling, Churning, Frightening

Tornado

Violently

Touched

Down in Kansas

Some students' finished poems:

Root of it All

Wow, I can't believe it's been a week since my last post! I wanted to share the Word Work we do daily. Most mornings I introduce a new prefix, root, or suffix to the students. Each student has a word work book that I made them. We fill it out together with me telling them the definition and two examples. They students tell me what word segment it is and we discuss as a group a picture to represent that word into our memory. Drawing words when it comes to vocabulary study has shown to help in the aid of recall.

Part of morning work the following morning students have a leaf on their desk. They are to write a word that has the word segment we had learned the previous day. The student's goal is to think of a word that wasn't an example I gave or a word a classmate would think of. At times this can be tricky because they need to make sure that a) the word matches the definition of the word we learned and b) they aren't making up words. The leafs get added to our interactive bulletin board. I got the idea of the bulletin board from the pin of Dandelion and Dragonflies blog. It has been great teaching these to my 5th graders, and tying it into our reading and writing!