Feeling, Seeing, Hearing, Tasting, and Smelling Feelings

One of my favorite books to use in writing poetry is...

What Does Peace Feel Like?

by Vladimir Radusky

   

If you have not read this book, the author uses children’s descriptions of what peace feels, looks, smells, tastes, and sounds like.  Their descriptions are precious!

After reading this book to my class, we brainstorm ideas for a different feeling, joy, using the Mimeo board and the document below. 

Here is an example of what we brainstormed for joy...

Once my student are bursting with the excitement of their ideas, I ask each student to choose a different emotion to brainstorm on their own.  I give them this sheet to guide them...(Click on the picture to download this sheet!)

After I give the students a day or two in writing workshop to brainstorm, we are ready to take our ideas on to the next step.  I model for the students how we take our brainstormed ideas and put them into the poem.  I make sure to let them know that it's okay that every idea is not used, but we do want to use the one that are the most powerful and can help our readeer use their senses too.  We play around with some of the ideas that we brainstorm together.  I remind the class how the good ideas that we are looking for are the ones that will make us feel joy as well as our reader!  Just simply saying "the playground" is not going to make our reader feel that joy...instead "bursting into a run from the school doors onto the playground" would make our reader feel more joyous.  Here is how our class poem ended up...



Student then get time to play with their ideas and write their poems.  I work with the students in conferences to improve on some of those ideas that tell the feeling instead of showing it.  After some hard work and revision, we have poems that are just as precious as the book that inspire them.

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