It’s that time of year when I get tired of doing winter activities with my students, but still walk down the hall and see snowmen and snowflakes decorating the walls and doors. In a few weeks it’ll be St. Patrick’s Day and I decided to start it this year a little early so I can bring a pop of color to the wall directly outside my room.
I saw these cute rainbow crafts on Pinterest and decided to tweak it a little so it would include Limerick poems that I wanted to write.
Now, when I taught fifth grade a few years back, we wrote Limerick poems and the students caught on pretty quickly. I wanted to try it with my third graders this year, but was a bit hesitant because I didn’t know if they would be able to get the hang of both the rhyme scheme and the syllable patterns.
To introduce this, I read a few cute Limericks from a book in our school library. Then, we used colored pencils to underline the AABBA patterns for a few Limericks that I had printed for the students.
After reading those poems, I decided that we would make six examples as a class. Before school, I thought of six names (for our leprechaun in the poems) that would lend themselves well to rhyming. I put these six names with the rhyming words under to help spark some ideas.
The first class-written poem was mostly generated by me, but once we started going, and after explaining that the whole Limerick should be like a short story and not individual lines that just happened to rhyme, the students actually started to understand!
Now, I had only planned to spend about 30-45 minutes on this, but I decided to just keep going because they wanted to write one on their own while it was still fresh in their mind.
Although I still think that the syllable pattern could be a bit stronger in some of these, I was very surprised at what these kiddos came up with all on their own. I was actually laughing as I was reading these, so I thought I’d share a few with you below.
