Finding Patterns in Poetry

"A pumpkin got bitten by a werewolf at night, and a cat with a rat found meat to bite." 

Perhaps not award-winning poetry, but not bad for a first-grader still exploring word and rhythm patterns.

That's what we've been doing in first grade this year -- patterns. They have found repeating patterns, sorting patterns, increasing and decreasing patterns, and patterns all over the school when we went on a scavenger hunt.  They have kept records of all their patterns in a digital journal, using the "BookCreator" app.

Last week, I read the fabulous poem, The Witch by Jack Prelutsky, to them. We identified all the rhyming word pairs, then found the patterns in the writing -- that the end word of every second and fourth line, for example, rhymes.

Then we used a tree map to come up with our own Halloween word rhymes -- even pulling in a rhyming dictionary to find rhymes for "pumpkin." This was definitely a challenging project -- but a lot of fun, too.