Teacher's Considerations
This unit has been developed for the elementary program as an introduction to poetry. A Quest for Poetry should be used in addition to your normal presentation of poetry and its many different types. As I teach children in grades 1-8, I have left the grade level of this open. The project is ideal for multi-age groups, but will also work well with single-grade classes.
You should arrange your students into groups of four before they are introduced to this web quest. Instructions have already had allowances made for rooms that need to have groups of 3 or 5, but the tasks are organized for 4 students. If you have students of varying abilities, I strongly recommend that you mix them together rather than arranging them by ability. This quest is organized so that students of all abilities can be successful in the group's project.
The goal of this quest is to help students practice writing and publishing their own poetry in a more practical format. Many elementary students would be overwhelmed with the writing of numerous poems for one project. The use of already published poetry helps reduce the stress of quantitative writing and focuses on quality while still producing a finished book that students can be proud of. Use of the internet allows the students to utilize computer skills with everyday learning. Encouraging students to also use the resources in your local library will help to strengthen their resource skills. The poetry collection further enables students to apply critical thinking, relevance, and classification strategies. The final project allows for the representation of grade appropriate editing skills, bibliography applications, aesthetic functions, handwriting/typing skills, and speech training.
Modifications can easily be made to this webquest by broadening the scope of categories, lengthening the number of personal poems, or choosing a particular style of poetry that must be included. You may also set specific requirements for the medium of illustrations for the poems.
If you find that the web sites are no longer active, you can find new sites for your students to use and place them into a word processing document as active hyperlinks. Show the students how to access that document, and navigate onto the web from your document. (Check your manual or friendly computer technician for instructions on how to accomplish this with your computer.)
A Glossary page is included for your students. This will help answer many questions that they might have.