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"ReadWriteThink.org’s poetry tools and lessons helped me see all the different ways my students could write poetry. It also helped them use their higher order thinking skills because they had to figure out how to integrate their research into acrostic and found poetry."
Virginia Rojas's Story
Connecting Poetry and Science
In my first-grade bilingual class, we studied oceans, and each students chose an animal to research. After the research, we collected all of our information and put it into a book. We included habitat, enemies, food, life cycle, and a "wow." A "wow" is a piece of information that wows the students about their animal. This year after the students wrote their book, I worked with a reading teacher to write poetry using their research. This was important to me because I had never written poetry with my students. This was a great opportunity for my students to get to know poetry through their research.
We used two different ReadWriteThink resources. We started with the lesson A Bear of a Poem: Composing and Performing Found Poetry. We adapted the lesson to fit with our ocean research by taking pieces of our research book and forming it into a poem. My students were amazed at themselves because they had taken their favorite ocean animal and written a poem.
The other ReadWriteThink resource was the interactive Acrostic Poems tool. This was really fun for them. They used their ocean animal research to write the acrostic poem. They had to think outside of the box to be able to write this poem because they had to think of words for each letter of their ocean animals. They wrote acrostic poems in Spanish and in English.
ReadWriteThink.org is a great tool to use because it got my kids writing poetry, and now it will be a resource that I will be using in the future.
I completed my bilingual education degree at Texas Woman's University in 2007. I teach first-grade bilingual at Hodge Elementary in Denton, Texas. My passion is literacy, and I have had extensive training in integrating science and literacy. I also help lead the school in the Latino Literacy Family Project.