USING POETRY IN THE CLASSROOM -- Part 5

It’s about time, teachers, that we covered poetry literacy centers.  I {heart} centers that have high interest for the kids and low effort for me.  That doesn’t happen overnight, but you can start to establish a poetry center and train you students to use it.  Then all you have to do is swap the poems and a few supplies.

Poems placed at the center must be familiar to the children.  You are just inviting problems if you post an unfamiliar poem.  Through shared reading, your students should have a clear understanding of the poem’s meaning or essence.  During those reads, ensure that your students understand the vocabulary and have sufficient background knowledge.  Ideally, the poem will be one that everyone can read independently.  If that is not possible, and I don’t believe it always IS possible, have a system whereby those who can’t read it can readily find a helper.

Poems placed at the center are in several forms:  individual copies for the students’ anthologies, an enlarged or poster version, and sentence strips with the poem copied on them.  A pocket chart is available for the latter.  Whisper phones are there, as well.

Have supplies available at the center so that students need not travel back to their desks to fetch them.  You can place the usual supplies, or for simplicity's sake, do as I do -- colored pencils only.  I call them "Poets' Pencils," which makes them more special to the children.  I love the metaphor that "Poets' Pencils" create colorful, figurative language.  Colored pencils are also preferable for highlighting and underlining words on the poem since they don't bleed through the paper.  They are erasable, too.

There are myriad activities for students to pursue.  As you can well imagine, the activities available at any one time, are limited and variable.  Following is an eclectic list of those activities:

          Read the poem with a buddy (EEKK)

          Find rhyming words & highlight them

          Illustrate the poem

          Find patterns in the poem

          Identify word wall words in the poem & highlight or make a list

          Highlight words that are hard or tricky

          Complete a poetry Cloze exercise (fill in the missing words)

          Make a bookmark based on the poem

          Read with expression/read the punctuation

          Build poems from sentence strips

          Create poetry with magnetic poem kits

          Memorize a poem 
          Perform a poem

Another set of activities at the poetry center is based on language arts skills.  The poetry center can reinforce skills currently under study or review some previously taught.  Some skill lessons to consider include:

          Onsets & rimes

          Rhyming words

          High frequency words

          Spelling list words

          Vowel sounds   

          Digraphs

          Blends & clusters

          Base words

          Prefixes & suffixes

          Punctuation

          Rules of grammar

          Parts of speech 

          Homonyms, synonyms, antonyms, homophones

For higher performing students in the early grades, as well as students in middle and upper grades, additional activities may focus on the craft of poetry.  Such activities include:

          Compose a poem

          Make text innovations

          Identify elements of a poem

          Explore figurative language

          Compare 2 poems using a Venn diagram or a T-chart

          Write a response to the poem

          Conduct an author study on the poet

In my next post, I will explore some of the activities in more depth.

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