Anagram Poems

A colleague of mine stopped by with a fascinating book recommendation. This was a lesson for me that one of your most valuable resources as a teacher is a great librarian. Ours is constantly stopping by with interesting books to support the curriculum she sees us teaching in the classroom. This day it was a poetry book called Lemonade: and Other Poems Squeezed from a Single Word by Bob Raczka.

I was excited about it because I like to try to do poetry at least once a month in the class because students who are just beginning to blossom as writers often have fun with the lyricism and freedom of poetry. In this case the poems were all developed from words created from other words. This not only was a great exercise in poetry, but a great word study activity. So I created a Smart Notebook Lesson to show off some of my favorites from the book. After the students heard some samples I gave them the task of creating words from the phrase "Monster Mash" since it was Halloween. As a motivational tool I told them I had come up with 53 different words that could be made from Monster Mash, instantly the students began working furiously to beat my record. The students worked collaboratively in table groups to come up with as many words as possible. I gave reminders that the words should try to fit with the idea of Monster Mash and Halloween so that the poem would make sense and had to hint at the importance of having small words like is and at to construct a cohesive poem. As with the nature of teaching the plan changed mid-lesson. The students were having such a good time creating words from Monster Mash that most of our time was taken up working on the word study piece of the lesson and less on constructing a poem. At the end of the class we put up some of the words the class had created and came up with a few different stanzas that could potentially become a very spooky, zany Halloween poem!