Grand Prairie students present Poetry Cafe'

Three classrooms at Grand Prairie Elementary School were recently transformed into Poetry Cafés to showcase second grade poets. The rooms were darkened and the poets were dressed in black shirts and colorful berets, with some wearing sunglasses. Each student sat on a director’s chair as he or she presented the poems they had created to an audience of their classmates and parents.

Teachers Jennifer Elia, Ann Curran and Joann Lynn of Katie Milosivic’s class used techniques learned in the school’s Lucy Calkins Writer’s Workshop training to develop the poetry unit. In their classes, the students practiced their writing and learned about the various poetic devices and styles. Each child worked very hard to create their poetry anthology. The students demonstrated sensory poems, concrete poems, bio poems, diamante poems, haiku poems and acrostic poems. They also demonstrated poetic devices including alliteration, exaggeration, personification, repetition, sensory images and similes.

The visiting parents were very supportive of the presentation of the poems by the students, snapping their fingers at the end of each poem in the tradition of poetry readings dating back to the 1950’s.