Running a Laid Back Poetry Workshop on Friday Afternoons

First, let me say, I kept Poetry Workshop SOOO simple this year. It was our last hour before the weekend and was a great way to expose my 4th graders to different poetic techniques and allow my students to be creative with writing and illustrating. I have lots of plans to amp up Poetry Workshop next year, but today I’ll just share the basics of what we did this year.

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WHAT WE DID IN OUR POETRY UNIT/POETRY FRIDAYS:

START WITH HEART MAPS

During the first week of school, we created heart maps, which many teachers use the idea {originated from Georgia Heard’s Awakening the Heart}. 

I was able to find a good number of free templates for students to use on TPT (here, and here). I printed multiple copies of each design and allowed students to choose the design they wanted to use.

This is one of those activities I do most every year, but it’s also one of those that I go back and forth about {perhaps because it feels like “same-old, same-old”}. However, I really wanted to have an artistic activity the first week of school AND I am so glad I had students create heart maps this year. I immediately saw their artistic talent and knew that I would need to capitalize on their abilities with my lessons and assignments.

SET UP iPOET NOTEBOOKS

At the start of the year we put our iPoet notebooks together with a table of contents. Check out those fancy spiral notebooks I landed at Walmart for 25 cents! I was so excited! I bought enough to have them ready for next year too 🙂 Our poetry notebooks were a combo of student-written poems and example poems from our mini-lessons.

Each Friday afternoon 1st and 2nd quarter, we had a Poetry Workshop. In the past, I pulled poems from various anthologies and would spend time each week searching for the perfect poems to use for our workshop. This year, I gave in to needing a set of poems already laid out for me.

You can find the two resources I purchased in the resource section at the end of this post. Both sets are great because they focus on different types of poems and literary devices. You can choose your topic, but you already have a good set of example poems to work with. {These TIME SAVERS made poetry workshop much more enjoyable for me each week!}

I printed the focus poems on 1/2 sized sheets. Students placed the poems in their poetry notebooks. When we looked at various features {personification, metaphors, onomatopoeia,  alliteration, etc), students highlighted the features in the poems.

THE WEEKLY POETRY WORKSHOP ROUTINE

Each week, we focused on a literary device, poem format, or technique. I projected example poems on the smartboard and students volunteered to read the poems aloud.

Throughout the year, I also taught lessons on how to brainstorm poem ideas and on how to use line-breaks to create rhythm and emphasis in a poem. When our iPoet pads started to fill up with example poems, we would start our poetry workshop with students choosing a poem from a past lesson to read aloud. Multiple students could read the same poem aloud and sometimes I would pick a poem and ask someone to read it. Can you say oral reading fluency three times fast?!?!? I had a number of students in speech this year and this was perfect practice for them. It was also a fun way to get us into a poetic mood! 

After moving on to our minilesson and focusing on a feature or device, students brainstormed poem ideas in their writer’s notebook {not the poetry notebook!}. I had to approve poems before students were allowed to copy them into their notebooks and illustrate them. Neatness and correct spelling was definitely a priority. I encouraged students to try out the techniques and literary devices we discussed but I did not require it as I wanted them to have time to create poems as they wanted.

END WITH A SHARING SESSION

To end our workshop, we always met at the carpet with our notebooks and had a sharing session. Often, I would start with a request for poems from anyone who had attempted to use the device/technique from our minilesson. Our share sessions were a great way to end the week!

WHY I LOVED IT:

1) My students’ enthusiasm! My students loved Poetry Fridays. I kept the block consistent every Friday during 1st and 2nd quarter, and I hope to carry it through the whole year next time.

2) Instant Revision. This is what sold me, something I’d never gotten out of poetry workshop before. As students asked me to approve their poems for their iPoet Pads, I could give specific feedback, review grammar, and reinforce spelling strategies on the spot. They were genuinely willing to revise, elaborate, and fix errors during that one-hour block. Some would take a single suggestion and run with it, bringing back a poem that had doubled in size or shifted perspective entirely. Poetry workshop made the writing process bite-sized: in one hour, students moved through every stage of writing.

3) A creative outlet. My students are talented artists, and poetry workshop gave them a weekly chance to draw, color, and be creative in the “regular” classroom.

HELPFUL RESOURCES FOR UPPER ELEMENTARY POETRY UNIT

• Heart Maps: Helping Students Create and Craft Authentic Writing by Georgia Heard – A guide to helping students write with purpose and meaning. Georgia Heard asks, “How do we get students to ‘ache with caring’ about their writing instead of mechanically stringing words together?” An amazing read.

• Awakening the Heart by Georgia Heard – The book that changed my “poetry teacher” life. I use heart maps every year in the first week of school to help students care about writing and tap into the people, places, things, and memories close to their hearts.

• Heart Mapping Handout/Brainstorm Helper – A free printable template students use to map out what matters to them before drafting their first poems.
• Mentor Poems for Teaching Poetry from Lorrie L Birchall (TPT resource) – One of the two example-poem sets I bought this year, organized by literary device so you have model poems ready for each mini lesson.
• 20 Poetry Forms from Dot Cates (TPT resource) – The second set I used, focused on different poem formats, perfect for the weeks we explored structure rather than a single device.

🌟 Building a love of writing and a love of reading go hand in hand, if you want to start the reading side, grab my Building a Reading Life lesson free.