Search Results for: billy collins

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Month of Poetry Giveaway

A lexicon is a collection of words.

One of my favorite elementary memories is my Word Box, where I organized the many wonderful words I collected as I read. This month, as we celebrate  National Month of Poetry, we will be giving away two wooden card catalogue boxes, complete with ABC dividers and 3 x 5 cards.

Enter to win below:

National Poetry Month

And that’s not all! We are offering a discount on our Operation Lexicon units, plus all things poetry during the month of April. Using the code NatPoe10 you can pick up Introducing Poetry and Small Forms Poetry too! What better way for your students to start collecting and crafting words than to dive into one of these unique units?

Exploring Poetry will inspire your students to use words well:

Small Forms Poetry will inspire students to explore to poetic forms, the small ones, inspiring them to make ever single word count:

Operation Lexicon inspires students from 3rd Grade…

…through 12th grade to collect words:

Operation Lexicon 11 - Shakespeare

And if that’s not enough to inspire, consider the following CORE Integrated Literature and Writing units that are poetry adjacent:

  • Earlybird, Douglas Florian

  • Level 1, Love That Dog

  • Level 2, The Poet’s Dog

  • Level 2, Inside Out and Back Again

  • Level 3, Out of the Dust

  • Level 3, Locomotion

  • Level 3, Silver People

  • We have wonderful words for ALL!

It’s April! It’s time to dive into the wonderful world of poetry!

A great place to start is “How to Read a Poem” by Billy Collins—start HERE.

~Kimberly

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The BEST Sentences are Poetic!

This poem is a call to ACTION:

   to see light through the color slide,

   to listen for the sound of the hive,

   to watch the mouse wander its way through the maze of the poem,

   to feel around in the dark for a light switch,

   to waterski and wave at the author who is standing at the shore

   (patiently smiling, I imagine).

This poem is also a REMINDER:

   to NOT tie the poem to a chair and to NOT torture a confession out of it.

 

Deconstructing poems to shreds of rudimentary grammar and mechanics, rhythm and rhyme scheme, always distracts the reader from the ability of poetry to resonate a wonderful thought provoking idea!

Reading poetry aloud helps us listen for the lovely sounds of language.

Reading poetry on the page helps us see the way words work together and empowers us to write splendid, strong sentences.

This poem, as example, is comprised of four sentences. FOUR—count them. Each begins with a capital letter and ends with a mark—four beautifully simple sentences broken into bite-sized fragments. Here, Billy Collins demonstrates how words are woven to phrases, phrases to complete ideas in the form of a sentence.  Furthermore, when a poem is written to help us consider just exactly what a poem is, well that poem is a an ars poetica (click through to learn a little more).

Listen to Billy Collins narrate this wonderful poem here.

 

~Kimberly