Poetry has been on the minds of students at Park Avenue Memorial Elementary School, where all classes are participating in literacy activities to coincide with National Poetry Month.

The new unit of study is part Columbia Teacher’s College Reading and Writing Project, in which students become immersed in the written word. Classroom libraries are filled with poetry books that give children exposure to different kinds of poems such as rhyming, free prose and acrostic. Students have been working in pairs to analyze poems and write down their observations such as the tone, purpose and structure of a piece.

Using these examples, students are becoming poets themselves and honing their craft in poetry notebooks. Candice Laviano’s fourth-graders have found new and fresh ways to write poems, like when they recently created fantasy pieces about ordinary objects found in the home or classroom.

In several classes, students are completing entries for the Amityville Teachers Association’s annual poetry contest.