Wichita Falls Workshop

Janet (Wong) and I ended the school year with an all-day workshop for the teachers of Region 9 in collaboration with Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. All the teachers had finished the school year with their students, so I expected them to be exhausted and ready to rest. But we had a wonderful audience of enthusiastic and articulate teachers who were fully engaged! And we covered a wide range of topics:

Session 1: Creating a Positive School Culture with Poetry

Successful educators build regular “touch points” into their routines to create a safe and engaging learning environment. Poetry can be a powerful tool for offering a shared literary experience in just a few minutes, providing both curricular benefits and emotional connections.

Session 2: Poetry, TEKS, and Take 5!

The Take 5! approach featured in The Poetry Friday Anthology series allows teachers to share poetry—as well as connections to the TEKS and the details and patterns specific to poetry—in simple and meaningful ways. Step-by-step instructions and a wide variety of examples across grade levels will give teachers confidence in using these mini-lessons right away.

Session 3: Building Basic Language Skills with Poetry 

The Poetry Friday Power Book series provides easy-to-implement mini-lessons in prewriting, writing, and basic language skills such as spelling and punctuation. We’ll demonstrate creative strategies to engage students in reading and writing poetry while integrating these basic skills.

Session 4: Poetry Across the Curriculum

We will show how infusing poetry across the curriculum can serve to jump-start or introduce a topic, present examples of terminology or concepts, provide closure that is concept-rich, or extend a topic further. The brevity of poetry is less intimidating to children who may be overwhelmed by streams of new vocabulary, especially students acquiring English as a new language. 

Session 5: Thinking Deeply with Poetry Collage

Taking the time to “unpack” a poem, think about it deeply, and represent it visually is a way to integrate reading and thinking, and develop skills AND creativity. In this final session, we’ll engage in a collage activity that helps students think visually, expand their imaginations, and develop higher level skills of interpretation and critical thinking.

We demonstrated tons of strategies and activities and shared poetry from many different sources. We had crazy prizes to give away and challenged people to find a poem that would go with the prize and they would win it! this included a baseball bat, toy cars, bubbles, etc. That was such fun! And getting crafty with poetry was a great way to end the day-- taking poems apart and then visualizing them with images, color, lettering, etc. 

It just goes to show you that poetry can be a great way to start the year, but it's not a bad way to end it either! 

Now head over to Reflections on the Teche where Margaret is hosting our Poetry Friday summer fun!