The Mothers’ Day Tea

By Cathy Urfer

“… And I love my Mother,” the child finished saying aloud to his peers and the mothers. On Wednesday, May 9, from 1 to 2 pm, Mrs Smith’s second grade class had a Mothers’ Day tea party. During this tea, each individual student and their mother came to the front of class. Then, the child read a small story about their mother that they wrote to give to them. Afterwards there were refreshments for the child and her/his mother to enjoy. At the end of the tea all of the boys and girls stood up and read aloud together a lovely poem about why they loved their mothers. The tea party was splendid.

There’s Poetry In The Air

By Meghan Barbour

There was poetry everywhere for the third graders of Mrs Martenson’s class at Hawley School. They just finished up their lesson on poetry. They did all different kinds of poetry such as cinquains, haiku, and diamantes, shape poems, acrostics, free writes, and couplets that were fun and silly. Mrs Martenson told me that the children really did have fun doing poetry. Some of the kids rhymed their poems, and the others did syllable poems. Each student had their own little book of their own original poetry. They also went outside and found objects like pinecones, bark, and all other things outside that they could write about. They used similes and metaphors in their poetry.

In Mrs Martenson’s room they have a chair in the reading center where she reads poetry to her class to give them ideas for their writing. Sometimes the kids even bring in objects from home and they write about what they brought in. They do share poems from real poet books too. All of these activities helped the children through the process of writing poetry. For the poems they wrote, they made a list of descriptive words to use in their writing.

The other three third grade classes did not do poetry. It was a free choice for Mrs Martenson’s class. A Newtown High School student who was working on her senior project assisted in this lesson. This student is thinking of becoming a teacher some day. After all the hard work that the third graders completed, Mrs Martenson organized a small ceremony to read their poems to family members and friends. The parents were very proud of their children’s hard work and the students were proud of themselves too.