Acrostic Name Poems

Remember writing an all about me acrostic poem when you were a kid?  I always found it hard to think of words for the letter K other than ‘kind’…. ‘kissable’… I may have even once resorted to ‘Kool’ with a K which is neither cool nor correct.

This past week in my Writing classes we have been creating our own acrostic name poems using the personal adjectives that I have been teaching in Communication.  It’s nice to have a bit of cross over between the two subjects so I’m glad that I teach both to a couple of my classes.

My Matthayom 1 students did a wonderful job at brainstorming and creating their poems and decorating them for homework.  Somehow the warm up task of writing an alphabet of adjectives on the board turned into a mini-competition with students fighting over board space and marker pens; I swear anything that involves writing on the board is super exciting to these kids – on Friday we had a bit of a free fun lesson as we had completed the first unit and had a lesson to spare, and I told one of my classes we could play any game that they liked and of all the fun activities I have done with them they all wanted to play a word game that involved writing a noun, verb, adjective, animal etc. for a given letter.  They could have played ANYTHING and that is what they desperately wanted!  So my free fun lesson kept it’s educational element after all!

Here are some of my favourites; I especially like the poem written by a girl named Beam who lists ‘A smart girl’ immediately followed by ‘Modest’.  I think the irony was lost on her.  Some students didn’t grasp the concept that the poems were supposed to be within the topic of ‘all about me’ and simply wrote any old sentences – “Ants are small animals”, “Needles are very sharp” or simply “Umbrella”; although I’m sure the latter could be considered modern minimalist poetry in some circles!

Just a note if you are a fellow teacher thinking about doing this activity with Thai students; some Thai nicknames are 2 letters long such as ‘In’ or ‘Fa’ and so I said that they had to  use their full name, which in Thailand is often 10, 11 or 12 letters long such as ‘Warrissara’ or ‘Kannichorn’.  I set the minimum word count at 4 letters so unfortunately some students in the class only had 4 letters to write sentences for and others had 10+!!!  Also, have a dictionary to hand as there are a lot of tricky letters that crop up time and time again in Thai names and I struggled to think of different adjectives for some of them!

I look forward to collecting the completed poems from the Matthayom 2 students on Tuesday and will post any favourites again.