I love poetry.  And I have taught it roughly the same for the last 9 years or so.  So this year, I thought I'd switch it up and bit, and instead of crafting a different type of poem for their portfolio entries, I thought I would have them craft one poem (from a memory or topic they loved) and then have them rework that same poem, focusing on a different aspect of poetry each time, i.e. tone/mood, theme, figurative language, etc.  So their portfolio would all be the same topic, same poem really, just altered to highlight a new aspect of poetry each time.  We'll see how that goes!

At this point in the lesson, they have crafted an original poem about a topic they love.  For collection purposes, we started with T-charts like the ones below:

Best	Worst		First	Last
dinner	dinner		job
date	date		day of school	day as a student
vacation	vacation/trip		time I saw my kids	time I say my Grandpa
job	job
friend	enemy
Hobbies	Skills		Favorite Things	Least Favorite Things
cooking	teaching		football	nails on a chalk board
kayaking	reading		my children	failure
swimming	singing		music	laundry
reading			water anything

Then we choose one of the subjects, one we could really talk alot about and we created a web of that topic with all the words that popped in our heads from that topic.  I chose kayaking, because it is almost kayaking season and I love it!! I'll  upload my web and the resulting poem after bit.  (The students are coming! LOL)