Mrs. Carney’s class came to the media center today and studied concrete poetry. Concrete poetry takes on the shape of what it’s about. As a class, we created a poem about a book. Although the version in this blog doesn’t look like a book, our poem that we wrote together on the Smart Board filled the shape of a book (see the picture in this post). To write this poem, we read lots of concrete poems. Then, the students brainstormed possible topics. After choosing “book” as our topic, we made a list of possible lines. Finally, we chose lines from our list to include in our poem. Enjoy!
A Book Is…
By Mrs. Carney’s Class
A book is…
a poem
our imagination
paper
an adventure
a story
made out of wood
a cover filled with words
A book is…
A book!
Expect the Miraculous 
What a wonderful idea! The poem is lovely. What sources of concrete poetry did you use for your examples?
The kids were so excited. It took some time to get them going with their list. I ended up getting them to complete the stem “A book is…” in order to help them think of lines. For examples, I used A Poke in the I, Doodle Dandies, and Splish Splash. We also looked at One I Ate Pie because there were some lines in those poems that were shaped in different ways, such as a dog’s wagging tail.