Covering the World in a Couple of Hops Poems by Mrs. Shaw's First Grade Class with Ann Goette

In late October 1997 we began meeting on Wednesday mornings to brainstorm for our group poems. Except for the longer poems (such as the very scary "Graveyard"), every Wednesday we created a new poem. Our only boundary was that the poems needed to rhyme. But that was the structure we imposed upon our efforts. Within a couple of weeks of the "blast off" for our project, we had to keep the doors to Mrs. Shaw's classroom closed. The children shouted and raced for poetry lines. Every child, every single child, in the class catching on and catching fire. They went on to check poetry books out of the library, bring in books from home to share. Bless 'em, they love poetry. A roomful of first grade (first class) poets has now created an anthology of their very own works: Covering the World in a Couple of Hops consists of three sections. The first contains the poems we all wrote together, our group poems. The second section is "The Classy Bear" poems. The children sewed and costumed their own little bears. Then each child stood before the class and talked about his/her bear and, together, we wrote about the bears. The last poems are the individual ones. Every child who wanted to write a poem did so. Then most of the children wanted to write another and another and . . . . Before we found ourselves with a 500 page poetry collection written by six and seven year old zealots, we put the brakes on -- one poem per child. A lot of the children are still bursting with poems they want to write. A fine kind of bursting. - ag

Gilbert Linkous Elementary        GLE Creativity

Last modified on May 9, 1998.