Grade: 4/5 Subject/Unit: ELA / Poetry

Teacher: Ms. Alvarado Lesson: Concrete Poetry

Desired Results
Essential - What are strategies I can use to motivate students to write?
Question(s) - How can I promote literacy in the classroom?

GLO 1 – explore thoughts, ideas, feelings, and experiences.

Learning GLO 2 – comprehend and respond personally and critically, to oral, print, and other media texts.
Outcome(s) GLO 4 – enhance the clarity and artistry of communication

Students will be able to:

Lesson 1. Analyze concrete poetry and its characteristics
Objective(s) 2. Work collaboratively to create a concrete poem
3. Expand on their poetry writing skills

Assessment Evidence
Summative • Hand-out of Rainbow Formative
• Thumbs up/down
Assessment Poem Assessment

Learning Experiences/Opportunities
• Speaker
Ed Resources
• Speaker • Print hand-outs
Tech to Prepare • Make pairs
Time Allotment Content/Description Notes
Introduction/Attention Grabber:
• Okay guys! Hands-up! Who can tell me the name of the poet we’ve been
For pairs: Create with Mrs. Clark,
learning about lately?
then pairs write on board?
• Transition: One two three eyes on me!
• We are going to read a Shel Silverstein poem!
Activity #1: What do we notice about poetry?
Teacher Prompts/Cues/Explanations
•Read through “Lazy Jane” with the students.
•On the whiteboard write: what do we notice about concrete poetry?
•Brainstorm with the students. • 1.1 discover and explore –
Student Actions experiment with language and
• Providing answers forms
• No slime during this or computers • 2.1 use strategies and cues – use
9:10-9:15
Guiding/Prompting Questions prior knowledge
5 minutes
• What type of poetry did we do yesterday? (Alliteration) • 2.2 respond to texts – appreciate
• What’s different from this poem than the rest we’ve seen? the artistry of texts
Check for Understanding/Performance Indicators • 2.3 understand forms, elements,
• Hands-up if you have an answer! and techniques
• Thumbs up if we understand concrete poetry, thumbs down if we don’t
understand!
Transition Cues
• One two three eyes on me!
 Grade: 4/5 Subject/Unit: ELA / Poetry
Teacher: Ms. Alvarado Lesson: Concrete Poetry

Activity #2:
Teacher Prompts/Cues/Explanations
•Think/Pair/Share! With the person beside you talk about what concrete
poetry could be used for.
•We are going to create our own concrete poems! (Show example of template
on the board.)
•Your job is to use different colors for each line/sentence written! You are to
work with a partner!
•When you hear your names come up to me to receive your rainbow. The two • Here can have iPad playing
names I call up are partners! instrumental music.
Student Actions • 3.1 plan and focus – determine
• Creating poems with partners. information needs
9:15-9:30
• Hands up for refresher on what’s in a poem. • 1.2 clarify and extend – combine
15 minutes
Guiding/Prompting Questions ideas, consider the ideas of others
• Reminder! Does all poetry have to be sad? Serious? • 2.4 create original text
• Does it have to rhyme? • 4.1 enhance and improve –
• Remember to write your names at the top of the rainbow! appraise own and others’ work
Performance Indicators
• Lots of colors being used.
• Asking for examples on board.
• Students are paying attention.
Transition Cues
• One two three eyes on me!
• Hands up if you’ve finished your rainbow poem!
• If you haven’t finished that’s okay, you have 10 more minutes to finish!
Activity #3: Create your own with a partner.
Teacher Prompts/Cues/Explanations
• If there’s time, challenge the students to create their own poem using any
shape they want.
•Give examples like: Trace Hand, Heart, etc.
•If students don’t want to make their own, challenge them to create a
concrete poem in the shape of a cloud or raindrops for the rainbow poem.
Student Actions
• We could play heads up on my
• Creating own poem.
9:30-9:40 iPad as a brain break?
• Asking if they could do something different.
10 minutes • 4.1 enhance and improve –
Guiding/Prompting Questions
enhance artistry
• Reminder! This is your time, if you have unfinished poems from stations now
is the time to finish!
Performance Indicators
• Hands up if you’re still working on your rainbow poem!
Transition Cues
• If you can hear me touch your nose!
• When I say the secret word BACK TO YOUR DESKS!
• I will come around and collect the rainbows.

Lesson Closure/Cliffhanger:
• what did we notice about concrete poetry?
• Next class we are going to learn about all new types of poetry!
 Grade: 4/5 Subject/Unit: ELA / Poetry
Teacher: Ms. Alvarado Lesson: Concrete Poetry

What is the lesson about, and why is this lesson important to the lives of your elementary
students?
This lesson is about poetry and how different all of poetry can be. This lesson is important for the
lives of my elementary students because they are currently developing their own personal tastes
and opinions on art, I hope that by exposing them to all the forms of poetry that they start
developing a personal feeling towards the art form. This lesson is also important because I have
my students working together, in the future they will work with all types of people. I hope that by
partnering them up that the students learn how to work with each other, and manage their
frustrations calmly. Overall, this lesson is also important for their literacy development.

Identify those features in each lesson plan that demonstrate the strategic (rather than intuitive)
Lesson nature of pedagogical decision-making. Articulate specific principles associated with your PSI
Rationale coursework that you have integrated into each lesson (ie. learning theories, grouping strategies,
instances of differentiation, accommodation of individual learning needs, purposeful integration
of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Foundational Knowledge, educational technologies, etc.).
This lesson demonstrates Lev Vygotsky’s theory of learning, learning is what we can do with
support. Social interaction is a big part of this lesson, students who are stronger writers are paired
with weaker writers, that way both of them are engaging in the lesson and learning from each
other. Since they’re paired up, students who struggle have a more knowledgeable other to guide
them through knowledge, even if both students are struggling. In this lesson I use active recall
instead of reviewing what we know. By re-accessing previously learned information about poetry
by having students provide me with answers to brainstorm enhances their performance. In this
lesson I also use grouping strategies, I pair stronger/weaker students to enhance classroom
participation.