Tuesday, February 10

Class started with a discussion about how to turn in our Found Poem response to the Paulsen article.  There was some confusion about submitting it on blackboard.  You should be able to click on the Paulsen link under "Course Documents."  This will lead you to a page similar to a discussion board page where you can either type your response directly into the text box or brows your computer and add it as an attachment.  If you add it as an attachment, make sure it is in a Rich Text Formate (RTF).  Jaunita said you can also e-mail it to her or turn in a hard copy if that works better for you.  The found poem response was due today, so if you have not gotten it in do so soon!

After this discussion, we spent a couple minutes analyzing a second grader's writing sample I brought in.  We talked about the things this student could do (transition from thoughts, correctly use ? marks and ! marks, use some friendly letter formating (dear, love, P.S.), use the right sounds to create words that were very readable despite the incorrect spelling, capitalizing proper nouns, and use big words (allergic, excited, wondering).  We also talked about where we might go from here to help this student.  We said this student could work on using capital letters at the beginning of sentences and breaking up the letter into paragraphs.  

Next, Annie and Jenna K gave a mini lesson entitled "Dear Diary."  This lesson used a diary formate to focus on writing from different perspectives.  During this mini lesson we read portions of Doreen Cronin's books Diary of a Fly and Diary of a Worm.  We then intergrated art by having students make character hats to emphasis becoming that character and writing from that character's perspective.  

After the mini lesson, we used the poem The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams to learn how to mimic a poem.  Juanita then read a section from the book Love that Dog because The Red Wheelbarrow is mentioned in that book.  

Before we left Juanita and Danny read a poem from The Blood Hungry Kidney.  It was an entertaining poem and another great example of writing from a different perspective.  The poem even had some good science-type information about Kidneys.  

Homework for 2/12:  Find a poem or song you want to mimic.  Mimic the poem or song you find and then bring both the original and your mimic version to class.  Reflect on writing a found poem by responding to the e-mail Juanita sent this afternoon.