All About Alliteration: Responding to Literature Through a Poetry Link

Overview

Featured Resources

From Theory to Practice

 

OVERVIEW

Poetry offers many opportunities for word play and learning about language. But because poetry can seem inaccessible, many students approach poetry writing with trepidation. This lesson for third- and fourth-grade students is designed to overcome student fears by using a traditional poem to teach students about alliteration. After reading the book A My Name Is... by Alice Lyne, students use a variety of print and online resources to brainstorm their own alliterative word lists. They then create a poetry link that uses the traditional poem they have read together as a framework for their own poems.

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FEATURED RESOURCES

• Alliteration Brainstorming sheet: This useful handout will get your students brainstorming about words starting with the same letter, which will then serve as the basis for the poem they write.
  
• A My Name Is... by Alice Lyne (Scholastic, 1997): Your students will enjoy this well-illustrated jump-rope rhyme built on letters of the alphabet.

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FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

Certo, J.L. (2004). Cold plums and the old men in the water: Let children read and write "great" poetry. The Reading Teacher, 58(3), 266–271.

• A poetry link is a "writing suggestion, statement, or assignment that stems from an original text." Poetry links should be open-ended and should connect to your students' world.
  
  
• To make poetry links different from traditional writing prompts, class time should be dedicated to helping students brainstorm their own ideas for writing by looking closely at a specific text.
  
  
• When creating poetry links, teachers can also use concepts such as alliteration.

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