Acrostic Poems: All About Me and My Favorite Things

Overview

Featured Resources

From Theory to Practice

 

OVERVIEW

Students write free-verse acrostic poems about themselves using the letters of their names to begin each line. They then write an additional acrostic poem about something that is important to them. After proofreading, both poems are recopied or typed and illustrated and then mounted on construction paper for display. Several opportunities for sharing and peer review are incorporated.

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FEATURED RESOURCES

• ABC Word List: This list of words for each letter of the alphabet focuses on words other than nouns and provides a good starting point for an ABC word matrix.
• Acrostic Poems Interactive: Students can use this online tool to publish their acrostic poems.

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FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

The use of children's names in reading and writing activities can bring personal meaning to literacy work. Lucy McCormick Calkins, in The Art of Teaching Reading, emphasizes the value of using words that matter to children and describes a classroom scenario in which young children use their own names for a variety of literacy activities. Mariana Souto-Manning takes it a step further, emphasizing the importance of respecting students' names as part of a diverse classroom community. "By highlighting the importance of names and their many meanings and accents across cultures, languages, and places, we can create a space for acknowledging the identities children embody and move one step closer toward genuinely valuing diversity in classrooms." By using their own names as a starting point for writing free-verse poems, children are using words that are important to them while learning and reinforcing initial letter sounds."(2)

Further Reading

Mariana Souto-Manning. "Honoring Children's Names and, Therefore, Their Identities." School Talk 12.3 (April 2007): 1-2.

 

Calkins, Lucy McCormick. 2001. The Art of Teaching Reading. Addison Wesley Longman.

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