Pencil Topper... FREEBIE for Poetry Month

Are you familiar with pencil toppers? I use them with my sixers all the time. They are fun, handy little learning aids that the kids attach to the tops of their pencils. They can refer to the toppers as they might refer to an anchor chart hung in the room. I've most recently done toppers for parts of speech, classification of living organisms, "hamburger" paragraph, traits of good writing, and layers of the atmosphere.

I found the pencil topper template at Vicki Blackwell's Teacher Templates site years ago while searching for something else (flip flap chart templates). I downloaded the topper file, opened it in Microsoft PowerPoint, and began designing toppers for all my subjects, adding graphics and text as I needed. I was hooked!

This week while on Spring Break, I've been working on all kinds of teaching projects, among them a mini-unit for Poetry Month. I'll use a pencil topper to kick it off. On one side is the dictionary definition for the word POETRY and on the other a word cloud of various poetic forms. Maybe some of you would like to give these poetry pencil toppers a try. You can download the file HERE or by clicking on the link below the graphic.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6Q14Z2f7SoALUpSVVRIMWdyTUE/edit?usp=sharing

Print off the toppers on colored paper, cut them apart, and distribute to your students. Have each student write his/her name in the space provided, then glue the topper around their pencil. Your kiddos will need a bit of patience since they will need to hold the topper together while it dries. Once it's dry they've got a reference tool right in hand.

http://peanutgallery19.blogspot.com/2013/04/my-first-linky-party-celebrating-poetry.html

Happy Teaching,
Angela
The Teacher's Desk 6
teachersdesk@yahoo.com