Every 5th grader will enter a favorite book into the tournament by writing and presenting a summary of the book. This coming Friday, each of the four classes will vote the entries down to the 16 books that will enter the brackets. Competition will continue with head-to-head paragraphs about the books' main characters, the settings, key events in the stories, secondary characters, etc. The day before we leave for spring break, the entire grade level will vote for the overall winning book.
So tournament fever was in the air when we began Poetry Friday last week. One of my students made this bracket for his 16 favorite poems in David Elliott's In the Sea
The poem that wins the book for this student is
The Sea Turtle
Swims the seven seas
for thirty years,
then finds the beach
where she was born --
by magic, it appears.
How can she know to come upon
that far and sandy place?
Rare instruments of nature,
fair compass in a carapace.
© David Elliott, used by permission of the author
In his response to my request for permission to use this poem, David wrote, "...it's also my favorite poem in the book. One of the things I like about it is the juxtaposition of far and fair and how just the addition of one letter can change a word completely. I wish I could say that was a conscious decision on my part, but I'm not sure that it was. (Uh . . .can't remember.) Happy accidents can sometimes make a writer look much better than he is."
I got the "Bracketology" in the title of this post from Burkin and Yaris' post, "March Madness in the Classroom."
To try Bracketology in word study, check out this post at Thinking Stems.
Heidi has the roundup at my juicy little universe. Welcome back to Poetry Friday, Heidi!
