Poetry Coding for Christmas

I love Christmas in the classroom! It is a wonderful time of the year. Even for those students and teachers that don’t celebrate Christmas, it still feels magical in some way.

Today, we did a Poetry Coding activity using ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. Most students didn’t even know it was a poem that was later turned into a picture book. We talked about how it was written in the 1800’s. They also couldn’t believe it was “that old” as they said.

I put the students into groups of three people. Each group had the poem and a coding card.

I read the poem to the students first. During this time (I teach 4th grade) we talked about examples of figurative language, some of the “older” words in the poem that might not make sense to them, and the overall tone and mood of the poem. I found this very beneficial for the students when they began working in their groups.

The students then took the coding card and began “coding” their poem. The color of the bulbs on the coding card went with a specific characteristic for poetry (example: orange is figurative language.)

The students did a great job on the coding. Of course, some parts were harder than others. At first, we did not see any repetition but a student pointed out that “Dash away, Dash away, Dash away all” is an example of repetition. I was excited they were able to find it (since I had missed it.)

After they were done coding, I had each group get up and share some of the different characteristics they found in the poem. It was interesting to see the different things each group noticed.

Finally, I took up the poems and posted them outside our classroom on the wall. I placed on coding card up too so other students could see their work.

Here are a few end results: