I love the poetry unit! Over the past few years, it's grown to become my favorite ELA unit of the school year. It wasn't like I was super into poetry or anything when I was a student in school, but as a teacher, I've come to enjoy the creativity it elicits from the kids. Last year was the first year we truly integrated writing poetry into the unit, since it is technically designed with a primarily reading focus (with the exception of writing about poetry). And the poems that kids were able to produce last year blew 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. 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. ANYWAYS, yup, I love our poetry unit, and I'm pumped that its gotten underway.

Our Bucket Filler this week was Ava. One of the things I really appreciate about Ava is that I can tell when she "soaks in" what is being taught in class, because she immediately applies it to her work. For example, it was cool to watch her use what we focused on in some of our writing mini-lessons to add to and improve on her personal narrative. Not only that, but her spelling is substantially improving this school year, which Ms. Fudge, Ms. Jareo, and I are super pumped about!