We're two days into our poetry unit, and I couldn't be more pumped! I love the poetry unit. Over the past few years, it's grown to become my favorite ELA unit of the school year. To be honest, I wasn't a huge fan of poetry when I was younger. But now, as a teacher, I've come to enjoy the creativity it elicits from the kids. Over the last few years, I've tried hard to integrate writing poetry into this unit, despite it technically designed to have a primarily reading focus (with the exception of writing about poetry). And oh my goodness, the poems that kids have been able to produce over the years have truly blown my mind. The nice thing about writing poetry is that the genre lacks rules. All of the capitalization, punctuation, sentence structure guidelines we are tethered to when writing in prose are, in a way, thrown out the window. Not only that, but it allows students to write about literally anything, from feelings to interests to their own personal experiences. To this day, I have sixth graders who still share their poetry with me on Google Docs, and I love that. Reading poetry also has so many benefits. Of course, the descriptive and abstract nature of poetry gets kids really thinking and making sense of what they read. Making inferences is an imperative skill, and poems require a ton of inferential thinking in that you often have to dig deep to find the meaning packed behind each line of a poem. So yup, I love our poetry unit, and I'm thrilled that its gotten underway.

Our Bucket Fillers this week were Aliyah and Chris. I was so impressed with these two this week, particularly when it came to our spelling posttest for the most recent Spellography unit. To say they improved from pretest to posttest would be an understatement. They both clearly studied their words, and that effort certainly paid off. I'm so proud of them! Aliyah also worked super hard on the reading STAR test we took this week, and lately Chris has impressed me so much with how awesome he's been doing with transitions. I'm looking forward to having lunch with both of them in the upcoming week!