Here are Poems for Your Pocket!

by Shannon McClintock Miller1458687743815

As the weather warms up and the flowers start to bloom, we know that April is right around the corner.

And that also means that National Poetry Month is here.

The website states, National Poetry Month is the largest literacy celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K-12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary event curators, publishers, bloggers, and, of course, poets marking poetry’s important place in our culture and our lives.

There is a very special day during the month that we all love to celebrate too. It is called Poem In Your Pocket Day.

On this day, we celebrate by selecting a poem, carrying it with them, and sharing it with others throughout the day at schools, bookstores, libraries, parks, workplaces, and on Twitter using the hashtag #pocketpoem.

You can read even more about Poem In Your Pocket Day on the Academy of American Poets website.

As we prepare for Poem In Your Pocket Day this year, I have planned a fun day with a few of my favorite poets, authors, publishers, teachers and students.

My dear friends Mrs. P and Robert Forbes, who are both poets, are going to join me for a Google Hangout on April 25, 2016 with friends from Iowa, Colorado and a couple more places around the world.

We will be sharing poems from our pockets, creating poetry, and hearing poems from Mrs. P and Robert too.

Also, we have asked our wonderful friends at Cantata Learning and Capstone to join us.

They will be sharing poems, songs and books in the Google Hangout and online with all of us too!

I will share more details about the GHO on April 25 soon….And will tell you how you can be part of this fun celebration with all of us.

Here are poems for your pocket and a poster too!

To get ready for our Poem In Your Pocket Day Celebration, I have created several little poems that can be copied, edited, printed and shared with your students and communities for their pockets.

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I have created 12 poems for you to use….One about birthdays from Robert Forbes, two Mrs. P wrote just for our celebration, two from one of my favorite poetry books Sing a Song of Popcorn, several from Cantata Learning including Happy and You Know It and Spring, and one by Blake Hoena from the Capstone book, Trust, Truth, and Ridiculous Goofs: Reading and Writing Friendship Poems.

You can get them from the Poems and Poems for Poem in Your Pocket Day Google Doc.

I included each poem as 4 on a page so it is easy to make copies and cut them out for your Poem in The Pocket Day. And a poster that is a full size sheet of paper. You can find this in Canva at this link to even make your own changes to the pocket for a poster.

I would let my students and teachers pick from poems I had printed off….I just put them in a basket for them to look through easily. Many of them wrote or found their own poem too. The most important thing is that everyone has a poem in their pocket to share on that day!