April’s Book of the Month – Hey You! C’MERE: A Poetry Slam
April is National Poetry Month, and we encourage you to celebrate by reading poetry to your students and encouraging them to explore the world of poetry themselves. Hey You! C’mere: A Poetry Slam is a collection of honest, silly poems that will get your students thinking about words and the way they combine to make a poem. After reading the book with your class, you might want to consider some of the following activities and host your own poetry slam in your classroom.
About the book:
One summer morning in the sizzling city, seven kids gather on a street corner to share the power of poetry. As they move through the neighborhood, the kids transform their experiences — standing up to a tough kid, slurping spaghetti and ice cream, a good “hiccup cough sniff” cry — into a poetry slam celebrating the strength and energy of their own unique voices. Elizabeth Swado’s wonderfully aural work is given visual dimension by Joe Cepeda’s colorful, character-ful paintings. So come along and heed the call: Hey you! C’MERE!
Visualizing/pre-writing:
Use this activity as a pre-writing exercise to explore the importance of language and rhythm in a poem. Give each student a piece of paper and crayons. Without showing the students the pictures, read one or more of the poems to the class and ask each student to draw what he or she hears.
Brainstorming/writing:
After reading the poems in this book, get your students started working on their own poems by using some of the brainstorming activities below (from www.scholastic.com):
1. Word Play: Pick a word, any word, and think of all the words that rhyme with that word.
2. Object Observations: Pick an object — a pencil, a brick wall, a clock, a tomato — anything. Then write down everything you notice about that object.
3. Synonym Silliness: Think of an adjective, such as happy, soft, tall, or sleepy. Then write down all the words you can think of that have the same meaning as that adjective. This list will help a lot when you’re trying to describe things.
Now have your students write their own poems around the objects they selected, using their rhyming words and sentences to create their poem. Then invite your students to take part in a classroom poetry slam, sharing their creative ideas and images with each other!
