Creating a Poetry Notebook

A poetry notebook can be made up of poems that the students wrote themselves - or created from poems the students found by other authors - or a mixture of the two.

In any of these cases, it is important to create a rubric that identifies what kinds of poems should be included and how many poems. Do you want students to write or find poems in different forms, such as haiku, sonnet, cinquain? Or should it be a collection of the students' very best writing? Or should it be a collection of poems that mean something to the student? How many poems should be included?

I think it is important to set a minimum for the number of poems in the book. Ask students to include a table of contents at the front of the book, so you can see at a glance what is included.

Here is a sample rubric that I wrote for an assignment for a poetry notebook of my students' original writing:

Dialogue Poem (5 points)
Emotion Poem (5 points)
Environmental Poem (5 points)
Dada or Found Poem (5 points)
Color Metaphor Poem (5 points)
Concrete Poem (5 points)
Being the Thing Poem (5 points)
Narrative Poem (5 points)
Now & Then or Mirror Poem (5 points)
Haiku, Cinquain, or Limerick (5 points)
Your Choice (5 points)
Your Choice (5 points)
Your Choice (5 points)

Effort (5 points)
Cover (10 points)
Table of Contents (10 points)
Neatness (10 points)
Total