Video Visit to a Monarch Sanctuary in Mexico
Teaching Suggestions
Back to: Update | Video Clip

Capture the Wonder with Words
Writers collect words to help them describe the world. Have students view the video of a monarch sanctuary and imagine themselves there. What sketches and notes would a poet write in a journal while sitting below monarch-filled branches?

View the video a second time to collect sensory words and descriptive details. Use the Writer's Quest for Details journal page to help students use a variety of writing strategies to "find the words" that describe the monarch's winter habitat. Invite students to use the collected words and phrases to write poems that capture the wonder of monarchs in their winter home.

Here are some poetry forms and techniques to get you started:

List Poem:
In a List Poem, the writer starts by brainstorming a list, then writes a poem using words from the list. Each line typically contains one to three words.

Sample List Poem:

Stained-glass-window wings
Billowing, blowing branches
Butterfly beehive boughs
Silent, scurrying, struggling
Every one alive

Haiku
The Japanese Haiku is a poem of 17 syllables arranged in 3 lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables.

Sample Haiku:

tiny muscles stretch
warming, waiting, sensing all
soon to migrate back

AlphaAntics
Write a poem in which the first word in each line begins with one letter from the word "Monarch."

Sample AlphaAntics

In the Winter
by Rita Welch

Mountain slopes
Oyamel trees
Nestled butterflies
Arched branches
Resting roosts
Closed-wing clusters
Hush of winter wonder