Poetry workshop: the poetry suitcase.

Get your students excited about poetry by making daily readings a collaborative classroom experience. Five minutes before the bell each day, pull a suitcase from under your desk and announce "It's poetry suitcase time!" Let a student who's been especially helpful that day pick a poem out of the suitcase and read it aloud. The bell will ring just as the poem is coming to an end, and the kids will leave your room dancing, the music of language alive in their minds.

Using Props to Engage Listeners

Assemble the contents of the poetry suitcase with help from your students. Ask them to find a poem they like and copy it--along with their name and the name of its author--neatly on a piece of construction paper. Collect the poems, laminate them, and punch a hole in the corner of each before handing them back. The students should then choose a prop illustrative of their poem's theme, and attach it to the poem with a piece of string. Have them drop their completed project into an old suitcase that you bring from home. Your poetry suitcase is now complete! Because the kids will have chosen the props and poems themselves, they'll be eager to hear the selections each day.

Props as Poem Starters

After listening to suitcase selections for a week or two (and discussing "Today"), your students will be eager to write poems of their own. To begin, let them choose a prop from the poetry suitcase. Using the reproducible on page 50 as a guide, they're now ready to write poems of their own about their chosen prop. When they complete their work, laminate and hole-punch the new poems, attach them to their props, and drop them in the suitcase. You may end up with several poems attached to each object, which is perfect for helping students understand what poetry is all about: finding a fresh and exciting way to look at an old subject.