Using Notes app in Poetry Friday

10 year olds sometimes change the most thought out lesson plans on paper.  I love when that happens in my classroom.  I was unsure how to use Notes which comes loaded on the iPod in my classroom but knew I wanted them to begin to work on their keyboarding skills.  My goals were to have the students continue to have fun with words on Poetry Friday, begin to discuss figurative language and find specific examples in the poems, but what came next was exciting.

I always start the year with singing poetry-the kids love it and really can’t believe that it is “real” poetry.  One of my favorites is Take Me Out of the Bathtub and other silly dilly songs by Alan Katz.  This year the kids enjoy:  ITCHY (tune of B-I-N-G-O) and Stinky, Stinky  Diaper Change (tune of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Start)

After we sing, we discuss the poem and started looking for figurative language including synonyms and antonyms.  On a side note, one student had been playing with the homonym app and recognized some of them in the poem and that started the homonym conversation. While we were having this conversation because it was so rich with so many examples, I decided to use Notes and began building a Poetry Friday dictionary of key terms with examples from the poems.  Using Notes has been interesting because now the students are looking all week for more examples and add them into their iPod then we share the new examples the following Friday.   Many times the best learning in the class comes in unexpected ways.

This is a snapshot of my iPod so you can see the notes as well as the keyboard.