Poems about animals

For the next two weeks at least we will continue reading and writing poetry. Today I shared different poems about animals. I read several poems about the same animal. It is amazing how differently the poets can write about the same topic, some playing with rhyme, some with rhythm, some with images, and some have complicated ideas hidden in their words. 

Now it was the students' turn to think and get started with some animal poetry. The key to it was not thinking about writing poetry, but rather envisioning a specific animal and collecting words, phrases, and images about it. The next step is to use the collected bits to combine and revise them into a poem.