Poetry Tool #2- Part C Alliteration

Greetings!
It has been FAR too long since I have posted on my poetry lessons, and now I am two weeks behind in posts. So I will try my best to blog over the next several days and catch everyone up.

We ended Post #3 at the middle of my Alliteration lesson. I had run out of time to really finish the lesson and so I simply had them read poetry books to find examples, which was part of the lesson, for a long amount of time. I found that I was in such a rush to "get through" the lesson, that I was leaving comprehension in the dust.

When they returned for the next class period, we started by correcting their homework, which was Lewis Carrolls, Jabberwocky.  I found that many of the students had a hard time because the poem has so many invented words (Tool #2, Part B) that they couldn't really make sense of the words. It was fun to hear what they thought some of the words were as well. This did take a large chunk of time, but I felt it was totally worth it because we were reviewing SO MANY concepts.

After we corrected homework together (I had a copy of the poem under the document camera), I reviewed what we had already covered about differences in poetry and prose, Tool #1 (Rhythm), and Parts A, B, and C of Tool #2 (Musical Language).


I was excited to have them pick up where we left of the day before and get them writing alliterative phrases/poem. I stuck with more of the tongue twister genre for this writing assignment because I REALLY wanted my students to HEAR the alliterative sounds. 

I instructed them to take the first letter and SOUND from their first name and try writing a sentence using that SOUND as much as possible. At first they didn't understand it too well. So I gave many examples using student's names.

Morgan makes mega muffins every morning. 

Rad wrestles really rowdy road-runners.

It only took a couple before the kids were having a ball. It really was fun when they picked up that the words the to SOUND the same, NOT start with the same letters!

Here are a couple of student examples:

I let them write for about 10 minutes and then I had them share their two favorites with their partners before drawing names and having 4 students read to the class.

I was really impressed with how well they did. I knew that this would become part of the "hunt"activities for the nightly poem and I was confident that they would master it over time.

For their homework, they read a poem called Chuck's Chips. It is in the Tongue Twister book I shared in my last post. The students had to identify the alliterative phrases in the poem (and there was a lot!) as well as all the other "hunts" I assigned.

Thanks for reading post #4 in this series. If you missed the first post, you may want to start HERE and catch up. :) If not, that's okay too. I am just so pleased that you are here. Don't forget to follow my blog to get all the latest news, updates, and more. 

Cheers!

-MrHughes