Kucan’s Article “I” Poems

I liked this article because students become the narrator, expressing thoughts and feelings from a narrators point of view.The “I” poems do not have to rhyme or have any formats to follow. Poetry is a way of transforming readings to the written form giving the students opportunities to express themselves from a perspective other than their own. I use a big poem for every month. The poem is on chart paper the size of a big book. Every morning we read this poem, then the line leader reads the poem by themselves. The poem for this month is an “I” poem. It’s repetitive and teaches book and print, punctuation, first word, last word on page, etc. I like the idea of reading a story and the students engaging in writing an “I” poem to enhance plot, characters, and setting. Today we read Froggy’s First Kiss and wrote our own Valentine poems and mailed them in our class mailbox. Since this is kindergarten, the poems where quite simple, but the feedback from the planning during group was wonderful letting me know they had captured Froggy’s feelings, emotions, and realized why he acted as he did. Again, this article helped me give other alternatives to writing.