Kids' Poems

In planning my week long poetry unit with a classmate, we used the tips in this book a lot!  This book also focusing on creating an appreciation and love of poetry in your students.  Routman has books for kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd grade, and 3rd & 4th grade.  Each book gives suggestions as to when in the year to start the poetry units, how to launch the unit, and what types of things you should do with the students during the unit.  She gives student examples of poems from their first draft (in kids' handwriting) to their final, typed draft.  In our unit, we used those drafts to show students where their poems were going!  It was great to get the students excited about "publishing" their poems after looking at these examples.

Routman, R. (2000). Kids' Poems: Teaching Third and Fourth Graders to Love Writing Poetry . New York , NY: Scholastic.