Poetry Portfolios: Using Poetry to Teach Reading
Poetry has always been interesting to me, and I feel that it is an area of literacy that is extremely useful, yet sometimes neglected. This lesson plan demonstrates a poetry model that can be implemented easily in K-2 classrooms, while supporting the skills and knowledge being taught in the classroom. One of the most attractive features of poetry is that it is relatively brief as compared to other forms of text, and if the right kinds of poems are chosen, poetry can be very entertaining to students. This poetry lesson incorporates teaching one poem per week to students, in daily 15-minute lessons.
During the first lesson, the poem is introduced to the students through a prediction task, encouraging students to think about the poem and what it might be about. After predictions are made, the teacher reads aloud the poem to the students, modeling inflection and phrasing. The second lesson focuses on the vocabulary in the poem. Students locate words in the poem that are unfamiliar to them, and the words are discussed as a class. The third lesson allows the teacher to focus on different skills that can be taught using the poem. The skills taught are dependent on the particular poem being read. For example, some poems might have several compound words in them, others might have beginning blends, or several words with the long /i/ sound. In the fourth lesson, the focus of the lesson is on the sentence structure of the poem. The poem is broken into phrases, and each phrase is written on a sentence strip. As the poem is reread, the students place their phrase into the correct order on a pocket chart. Finally, in the fifth lesson the students reread the poem and discuss comprehension questions as a class. The students are given the poem to keep in a poetry notebook
I thought this lesson could be very beneficial in a K-2 classroom. It seems that often there are small blocks of time during the school day (15-20 minutes in between two other scheduled activities) that can sometimes be difficult to plan for. It’s such a small amount of time that often a lesson might not be able to be completed. This time would be perfect to continually use a poetry lesson such as this. Overall, I thing the RWT website is amazing. I had looked at it briefly on a few occasions, but haven’t ever looked at it as in depth as I have now. It is definitely a fantastic tool for teachers.
MaryBeth Davenport