An Autumn Walk with Poetry, Personification & Zen Doodles

It had been a long week- two nights and an afternoon of student-involved conferences, with a respiratory infection. Add finishing data digs and professional goal setting to that mix and  I had survived the perfect storm.  Needless to say, we were tired.  I needed to do something that would make our hearts sing.  We had been so focused on data and assessment. My students needed this as much as I did.

So, I introduced my fifth graders to Pulitzer Prize winner, Carl Sandburg. Carl Sandburg has been a long-time favorite of mine.  I chose to share his poetry  because of the figurative language he uses, especially personification.  Even though this was a fun, low key project, I used it as an opportunity to teach descriptive language.

Over the last five years, I've noticed a trend. My students have difficulty identifying and understanding descriptive language when they read.  When they write, they have trouble using it.  Perhaps it is the lack of conversations we have now, due to technology, that has caused this.   Our oral communication has changed. I've also seen a decrease in my students' vocabularies.  This shows up on our NWEA assessments.  However, it really shows up in their daily writing and reading. So I've made it my mission to provide my students with more opportunity to engage in descriptive talk, writing and reading.

I shared "Theme in Yellow with them. I used a close read approach this part of the activity.  We read the poem four times, each time delving a little deeper into Sandburg's imagery.  We talked about how sometimes when we visualize, we don't just think about what we see. Sometimes we imagine sounds and smells...the way the skin of the pumpkin feels to our hands, or the smell of bonfires in the distance. We tried to put ourselves inside the poem.

Then we discussed personification.  Even though they had learned about this literary device in fourth grade, none of them could remember what it was.  We reviewed it and spent time discussing how Sandburg uses it in his poem.  Then we practiced writing personification sentences about classroom objects. For example, "The stapler bit my finger." or "The pencil sharpener choked on my pencil!" We had a lot of fun doing this.

After sharing the poem and learning about personification,  I showed my students some photographs of autumn subjects.  We went through each photo and discussed ways we might personify it.

We personified autumn!

Students wrote practice personification sentences about their chosen photograph. And then, I taught them how to write a biographical poem for a something non-human!  We wrote our poems as if the fall object or animal was talking.   I modeled taking my personification ideas and using them to write the lines of my poem, using the provided sentence stems. Students followed suit, trying it on their own.  The final step in our writing, was exploring ways to get rid of the sentence stems to create our final drafts. We practice reading our poems aloud so we could hear how the rhythm changed when we omitted certain sentence stems. My poem drafts are below:

November's Tree- ROUGH DRAFT

I am November’s tree

Bare, gnarled, and rough

I see the harvest bonfires in the valley below.

I feel alone. 

I loved the children who swung from my branches.

I remember the summer’s warmth.

I want the robin’s egg blue sky and buttery sun.

I touch the midnight blue sky strewn with diamond stars.

I dream of spring robins.

I am November’s tree.

November's Tree- FINAL DRAFT

I am November’s tree

Bare, gnarled, and rough

I see the harvest bonfires in the valley below.

Now alone,  

I loved the children who swung from my branches.

I remember the summer’s warmth,

the robin’s egg blue sky and buttery sun.

Now, I touch the midnight sky strewn with diamonds.

I dream of spring robins.

I am November’s tree.

By Tracy Willis

You can see the evolution of our poems when we deleted some of our sentence stems. This type of revision was a new experience for my students. We used whisper phones to read our versions to ourselves. They helped us pay attention to the rhythms we were creating. Then, we published.

Later in the afternoon, I taught them about zen doodling. We used leaf templates on brown paper bags to make large leaves.  We practiced different doodle patterns and then drew them on our leaves. We traced the patterns using black or white crayon and then broke out the watercolor paint pans. They were gorgeous and a perfect compliment to our poems!





I have to say, this creative writing, reading, and art activity was the perfect way to counterbalance our October stressors.  You can find it for your own classroom by clicking the graphic below.  It has everything you need for a literary autumn hike with your kiddos!

Psssst! There are a couple of Halloween freebies below to help you through the holiday!