Live and Learn: End of the Year: Summer Poetry and Activity Pack

Monday, May 30, 2016

End of the Year: Summer Poetry and Activity Pack

With just weeks of school remaining, I am thinking about what worked and what didn't this year.

I will be posting and sharing different practices that I will continue to use and those that I will put aside as I go into Fall 2016. One mainstay for me has always been and will always be the use of poetry to develop fluency and expression. Besides that obvious advantage, poetry can also be used as a vehicle for comprehension and vocabulary instruction.

My students use a marble composition book as a poetry journal. We set it up during the first week of school and add poems throughout the year. By the end of the year, they have a whole anthology of third grade poems.

Our poetry sequence goes like this:

I usually introduce the poem in a whole group lesson. I will often display it on the smartboard and will cover key words. Students use context clues to determine possible missing words. Then we uncover the words and read and discuss it.

Students love the activity called: Actors and Reciters. For this, half of the class recites the poem while the other half acts out each line. Then we switch roles. I love this because it gets them up, moving and it appeals to those dramatic types in the classroom. The reciters are attempting to read it all together. That helps model fluent and expressive reading for those readers who may be struggling and gives them a chance to hear it read out loud again.

Then the week's poem will go into a reading station for the next day. Students get a copy of the poem and glue it on one side of their poetry journal. Students will read it again three times with a partner. The first time they read it by themselves to warm up. The second time, they read it by taking turns reading stanzas and the final time, they read it chorally- two voices at the same time.

The next step is having the students create a meaningful illustration to go along with the poem.

We call this the visualization - or the mind movie.

Students are encouraged to add words as captions or labels to explain their illustrations.

I call all spelling for this activity: no excuse spelling. The words are in the poem- this helps students practice accurate spelling.

The next day, they will be given a poetry follow up activity based on the week's poem.

This requires them to dig back into the text to hunt down certain words or to look for evidence to answer comprehension questions. Here is an example of a follow up:

We also use our poetry journals for word study word hunts. Students may need to word hunt in past poems for different spellings of long a words, for two syllables words, compound words, contractions, etc.

The poetry journal works fabulously for oral language practice too. A few times a year, I have students pick a past poem to recite out loud for the class. Students usually pick a partner or two to recite with. They figure out how to act out the poem with gestures or props. They perform their poems for their peers. We will sometimes call this: "Popcorn and Poetry" or "Popsicles and Poems" and I will offer the audience a treat to enjoy along with the recitals. Students get so clever and creative with how to share their poems. It is always a good time.

I will be sharing the poems I use in my poetry journals on my Teacher Pay Teacher Store.

I will bundle them by seasons. The first one I have posted is the Summer Pack.

It will take you through 7 weeks if you introduce a poem a day.

I have also used them stapled together in booklet form as just a "Summer Poetry Journal" and have used them for the last week of school. Children read and respond to a poem a day.