Writing Informational Persona Poetry: Transforming Ideas through Instructional Scaffolding
The power point of research done by Dr. Beth Frye and two classroom teachers, is an informative look into the use of I poetry in classrooms with struggling readers. I was most impressed by the contrast of pre-vocabulary and post-vocabulary in the students who took part in the lessons.
Students were immersed in I poetry, given a purpose for research, compiled information, wrote and shared their persona poetry and finally revised and published them. Students were given mentor texts that showed them what great I poems looked like in books such as Atlantic and Mohave. Students in the second grade class wrote a persona poem aout the Seguro Cactus and students in the first grade class wrote about different infamous pirates. Throughout the lessons students made meaningful connections to the content and were given a purpose for learning. This increased their knowledge of the content and helped improve their reading and writing skills.
I had a great time reading the poetry written by the students that took part in this program. The illustrations and detail contained in the poems were good indications of what was learned through the in depth study of each content area.
