Poetry Month at Alphonsus Academy

April is National Poetry Month, and we celebrated all month long! Beginning with a teacher professional development meeting, staff brainstormed activities for their students by writing their own poems! We explored sijo, a Korean poetry form as seen in Linda Sue Park’s The One Thing You’d Save. This book is a collection of poems written by students about the single object they’d save in an emergency and why. Teachers shared resources and planned a month’s worth of activities. Take a look at what our students did throughout April:

Preschoolers and their eighth grade buddies created acrostic poems about their favorite things.

Kindergarteners wrote and illustrated their own sijo in the traditional form which has three lines of thirteen to seventeen syllables. The first line introduces the topic, the second develops the topic further, and the third line has a twist–humor, irony, or a pun.

First grade is creating a whole poetry book with many forms including a sijo, list, picture, rhyme, haiku, and acrostic.

Second and third grade also explored poetry forms and wrote haikus. Third grader Emery S. went on to place second in her age level at the Chicago Haiku Festival!

Emery’s haiku “subway tracks”

roar of tracks ahead/ strangers waiting for the train/ going near and far

Fourth grade adopted the idea of One Thing I’d Save and created unique poems.

Fifth grade created blackout poetry–redaction for an impact–in connection with their ELA curriculum. In Math, students demonstrated their understanding of mathematical conversions within different systems of measurement (think: pints to gallons, feet to meters, etc.)!

Sixth grade wrote sijos in ELA and composed poems in Math AND Science class! To explore Geometry, students created shape poems to represent an element of the poem’s theme (ex: squares/right angles). In Science, students used their knowledge of chemical reactions to create sun prints and cyanotypes then wrote poems about their process.

Seventh grade also wrote sijos and explored displacement while reading A Long Walk to Water (also by Linda Sue Park), a book about children displaced by the second Sudanese Civil War in ELA. They then learned the basics of illustration using alcohol markers and created drawings.

Eighth grade composed sijos during Spanish class!

If you're interested in learning more about poetry and ways you can incorporate it into your child's life, check out the Poetry Foundation downtown!

STAFF SIJOS

FOURTH GRADE

SEVENTH GRADE SIJOS

EIGHTH GRADE SPANISH SIJO