Happy November, friends! Today I’m sharing my (newly discovered) obsession with writing with you in the form of Acrostic Poems. This year I’ve been blessed to be teaching writing to a great group of ELL students. We have been working hard on building vocabulary and understanding parts of speech. Around this time every year, I spend a good portion covering all things Fall (not just because it’s my favorite season :]) but because there are so many things to describe and remember. This makes Fall time my Parts of Speech MVP!
- Each letter of the poem (vertically) must begin the word and/or sentence (horizontally)
- The words we came up had to describe and/or be about fall time, or for this instance, Thanksgiving.
- Students could write one word to signify that letter, or they could create a sentence.
- If the word was questionable, they would have to justify it within the theme of the poem.
As we worked through the word, Thanks, this lead to a great discussion about fall in general. I find that real life pictures help so much when describing or trying to remember a personal experience or connection. I would usually do a picture search on Google (ahead of time) for some images of Fall and Thanksgiving. Especially working with ELL students, you need that visual for them to feel successful because sometimes they haven’t experienced it before.
After the whole group activity, they are welcome to go work on their own. I’ve used these poems in multiple different ways over the years: a stand alone activity, part of independent literacy center, or with an art project, like this one I did last year where we focused on pumpkins and sentence structure. We added this fall night landscape with our poems!
And last thing I wanted to share with you is one of my newest posts over at Laugh Eat Learn for this little guy, The Thankful Turkey Book. Make sure to check it out! It’s a fun writing (see, I told you I love writing!) craftivity where each feather is the tab for the page your students can write what they are most thankful for!
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