Fireflies. Is catching fireflies a special childhood memory? It will be for our students in Lombard. They absolutely love catching fireflies, so we though they would enjoy the poem, "Fireflies," by Paul Fleischmann. This is a poem for two voices. It is not only challenging to read, it is also challenging to understand, which is exactly what we wanted. The purpose of this lesson was for the students to practice using the questioning strategy that good readers use.
We had to first teach the kids how to read this poem with a partner. After they got the hang of reading it with their partner, they then slowed their reading down and began to record the questions that they had. Because it was such a complex text, they had many questions, mainly about the vocabulary. After that, as a whole group, we close read the poem to try to answer our questions. In doing so, we started to figure out why the author used certain words, and why he placed them where he did. We also inferred how the author himself felt about fireflies. He felt like they were artists, and that's why personified them in this poem. Our discussion led to much more than just answering our questions. It was a great, deep lesson. We got the kids thinking about more than the surface level meaning of the poem.
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| Click here to download this poem. You can download it even though it will say Woops! There was a problem downloading this document. That warning comes up because I typed this poem in pages. The cricket poem is also here. Anne and I used that poem to model the questioning strategy. |
We had planned for that to be all we did with this poem, but Kim came up with a great idea. We decided to have the students write their own review of this poem. We first showed them examples from Spaghetti Book Club of other students' reviews. We noticed that a review would need a summary of the text, our opinion of it, and finally our recommendation. We added the quick, but fun, art project to make some fireflies to go along with our reviews.
Visualization was the next strategy that we worked on. We introduced this strategy with our students using the book, Fireflies, by Judy Brinckloe. We didn't want the students to see the pictures, so we typed the story up. As we read the story, we stopped periodically to discuss our visualizations. Then we showed them the pictures. The students naturally used other strategies while we were reading. They made text to text connections, and asked questions.
Are you now in the mood to catch fireflies? Hurry up and catch some tonight before it gets too cold. Just remember to let them go just like the boy in Fireflies did!
Kim and Anne
