Kid-Made Poetry Valentines

If you have kids in the younger grades, you know it’s coming…the Valentine exchange! Each year, we TRY to make homemade valentines. This year, we had fun with some kid-made poetry Valentines!

These are SO simple and a great way to integrate poetry, rhyming, and writing a friendly letter.

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**The free download can be found towards the end of this post.

On day 1, I displayed the beginning part of the old poem, “A rose is red. A violet is blue.” We talked about the original poem and where it came from {integrate a little history here}. My goal was to have them finish the poem with their own creative rhyme.

I displayed the poem stem. We brainstormed words that rhymed with blue and wrote them in a list on our dry erase board.

Then, we brainstormed some silly ways to finish the poem. This models the rhythm and rhyme of the poem without giving them something they can copy. Plus, it makes it FUN to finish the poem.

Here are some of our fun creations:

A rose is red. A violet is blue. Let’s you and me go to the zoo.
A rose is red. A violet is blue. You smell bad, like a rotten shoe.
A rose is red. A violet is blue. A chicken says, “Cluck,” and a cow says, “Moo.”

After laughing a little, I asked would the poems we wrote be appropriate in our poems for Valentine’s Day? Of course, they answered NO!

Then, we brainstormed a list of words that we could include in our poems that would be more appropriate, such as Happy Valentine’s Day, love, like, and friend. {The beauty of doing this is that it acts as a word bank when it’s time for them to write!}

I gave them each a simple page that started the poem and they were to finish it. I challenged them to come up with two different poems. I was amazed at how quickly they did this!

On day 2, we edited our poems a little, adding capital letters to each line and making sure we had correct punctuation. They also read them to each other, making sure that each poem made sense.

I gave them the option to either type their poems or hand-write them on another piece of paper as their final copy. They chose to type them and we printed them off. You can use the more decorative page included on pg. 4 of the download if your learners choose to hand-write their poems.

On day 3 and 4, they cut out their typed poems with our fun craft scissors {like these},

mounted them to the inside of construction paper and included the greeting, closing, and signature in the friendly letter format. They decorated them with their own drawings and stickers.