Cinquain Poetry

This is a whole lesson (ppt, plan and printouts) on creating cinquain poetry.

It is scaffolded for children whose own vocabulary might need developing - rather than having to think of words themselves from a limited pool, they read and highlight a piece of descriptive text to pull out powerful vocabulary from this and create their own word bank to use. Works for higher ability, too as they can add their own ideas to the same word bank. I recommend that an adult work with the lower ability readers to understand the text extract when creating the word bank.

It would be good as a precursor to creating their own cinquains from scratch on something topical or relevant to a book you are reading in a subsequent lesson.

I have chosen one extract from a book about skating, Bubble Wrap Boy, by Phil Earle, and the other has been drafted by me in a similar style.

The examples in the slide show and handouts are based on skating - as I had a group of boys quite obsessed with it - who I wanted to make sure enjoyed the poetry. They did. Cinquains are always fun - all the better if they get to copy them up with illustrations, or do them on PCs to get the centering/format correct.

I hope you enjoy using this resource.