IT'S ABOUT TIME for BTS POETRY!

 

As you plan for the new school year, consider incorporating poetry into your daily lessons.  The potential for skills learned through poetry is nearly limitless.

Capitalize on the excitement of new school supplies to introduce this poem.  Then select from the Poetry Possibilities (lesson suggestions) the activities to employ.  This poem, for example, could be used to introduce/review adjectives and adverbs.  Challenge your learners to write an acrostic poem about their new pencils.  This poem is also great for studying punctuation.  Lots of possibilities here!

One of my favorite BTS activities is creating concrete poems about our new supplies.  These poems can quickly fill a blank bulletin board while celebrating your poets' efforts.

Use this poem to introduce similies.  Students can then write an acrostic poem about themselves that incorporates similies.  You'll learn a lot about your pupils.

Back to School Poetry Possibilities offers a variety of poems and a plethora of lessons.  Each poem has a custom designed teaching point about poetic elements and forms.  The Possibilities are tailor-made skills lessons, activities, and poetry writing prompts.  The range of reading levels makes this unit appropriate to both primary and intermediate level classes.  It also offers differentiated instruction to accommodate students reading above or below grade level.  AND, this week this poetry unit is discounted 20%.

IT'S ABOUT TIME for POETRY MONTH

 April is National Poetry Month.  Prepare your classroom for it with these resources:

These 20 posters each describe a type of poetry.  A sample of that poetry form is also included.  Display the posters as anchor charts or compile them in a notebook as a reference for your poets.

All of the poems and the teaching possibilities in this unit pertain to spring weather, holidays, and activities.

This unit provides teaching points, skill lessons, and activities custom designed for each.  Animal Poems masterfully combines language arts with science.

This unit also combines poetry and science as your students learn about states of water, clouds, precipitation, and content vocabulary.

This poetry unit combines poetry and the history of westward expansion.

Take your primary students on an African Safari through poetry.

These poems and their teaching possibilities are all related to feet and footwear.

These task cards are applicable to virtually any poem you may be studying. Skills range from simple identification of high frequency words to homophones; punctuation to personification; and suffixes to cinquains.

CHINESE NEW YEAR ACTIVITIES and RESOURCES

How do you celebrate the Chinese New Year? In my classroom, I use poetry to introduce the celebration. The following poem introduces some of the holiday traditions:

Chinese children will greet their parents and other adults by saying, "Gung Hay Fat Choy," which means wishing you great happiness and prosperity. Naturally, we greet the adults in our school with this phrase.

The dragon dance is often conducted in the streets during Chinese New Year. My students create a parade of their own using these templates:

We make a dragon for the parade, keeping in mind that the longer the dragon, the greater the luck it bestows.  To make the dragon's body, create an accordian fold. Use 2 strips of paper about 1.5" wide.  Choose different colors and make the strips as long as you like.  Begin by gluing the strips together. 

The head in these pictures is a template that can be colored or printed in color.

Of course I have a poem dedicated just to the Dragon Dance.

Along the way, I incorporate other learning. These activities are part of my Winter Poetry Possibilities unit. The possibilities provide a plethora of lessons from various disciplines.

GUNG HAY FAT CHOY!

 

It's About Time for M.L. King, Jr. Day!

It's about time, teachers, to get ready for MLK, Jr. Day! You may enjoy this FREE poetry resource. It comes with teaching possibilities and is best suited to intermediate students.

Enjoy!

POETRY - MY PASSION!

POETRY - MY PASSION!  

If you follow my blog, you know that I'm passionate about poetry.  I love writing instructional poetry and I love teaching WITH poetry.  Teaching WITH poetry does not mean specifically teaching "poetry," as in figurative language, iambic pentameter, sonnets, etc.  While I do teach those things when appropriate, I use poetry to teach reading skills, science, math, social studies, and a whole lot more.  To that end, I have a line of products called POETRY POSSIBILITIES.

I find it rewarding to take a poem and parse it for all the lessons hiding inside it.  Here's a sample to illustrate what POETRY POSSIBILITIES are all about --

This poem is from Poetry Possibilities for Animal Poems.

Are you skeptical about teaching math with poems?  Check out this poem from Back to School Poetry Possibilities and its potential math lessons:

Many of the possibilities are completely adaptable to distance learning.

POETRY POSSIBILITIES are well received by teachers.  

I'm confident you'll like them, too!

Using Poetry in the Classroom -- Part 5

It's about time for Veterans' Day, teachers! Naturally, that means it's about time for a poem.  And, of course, some activities to go with it.

This poem is an example of free verse; poetry free of rhyme and meter restraints.  It gives a concise history of this holiday.

After sharing the poem with your class and engaging students in a discussion about the history, place copies of the poem in your literacy center.  Challenge your students to find words that are homophones, highlighting them on their copies.  Then ask them to list the words and their alternate spellings.

You might ask the children to add to the list with more homophones they know.

Extend the learning by reading Granddad Bud: A Veterans Day Story, by Sharon Ferry.  It's an engaging book for all elementary students and provides great information about Veterans' Day.

Ask your students to write their own poems about Veteran's Day.  Suggest they write haikus, traditional Japanese poetry.  The stipulations for haiku are that the children write 3 lines.  Lines 1 and 3 should have 5 syllables each, while line 2 should contain 7 syllables.  Haiku poetry need not rhyme.  This exercise will give you insight into how well your class understands the holiday.

This poem is from my unit, Fall Poetry Possibilities.  It has many more poems and their teaching possibililites ready for your classroom.

You may also like:

USING POETRY IN THE CLASSROOM - Part 3

It's about time, teachers, to describe more ways I use poetry in the classroom . . .

Poetry is absolutely wonderful for phonics instruction.  Consider the following poem:

By drawing your students’ attention to the rhyming words at the end of the lines, you can quickly establish an understanding of rimes.  For example, high rhymes with dry.  The rime, however, is spelled quite differently.  Similarly, crawl and fall illustrate 2 rime spellings for the same phoneme.    

Certainly, phonemic instruction with poems is not limited to rimes. I use the following poem to focus on vowel sounds:

I’m a big fan of anchor charts that remind students of phonemes we have studied. Using an enlarged copy of the poem, I ask the children to find words with the long /a/ sound.  We record them on a chart.  Then I have them find the words with the short /a/ sound and we record those words.  We collaborate to add more words to each side of the chart and, thereby, extend the learning.

The following poem could be used to work on consonant blends.

My learners are asked to look for and circle all the consonant blends they can find.  Students should be reminded that the blends are not limited to the beginning of words.  BTW, I require my students to work in pencil so that mistakes can be corrected.

Hopefully, it is now clear that the possibilities for phonics instruction are nearly limitless!

You may be interested in these poetry resources:

USING POETRY IN THE CLASSROOM - Part 2

It’s about time, teachers, to describe more ways I use poetry in the classroom.  

Poetry lends itself to guided reading lessons so seamlessly.  Virtually any reading skill can be taught through a poem. The following is one I use for compound word study.

Depending on the students, this poem can launch the study or allow them to review the concept.  For primary students, I begin by demonstrating that compound words can be broken into 2 separate words. One of the most dramatic ways to explain compound words is to write some on sentence strips and then cut them apart in front of the group.  Using a pocket chart, you can “rejoin” and “separate” the words until the concept is clear.  This is also effective in showing them why some words may sound like compound words, but actually are not.  Then we hunt for compound words on an enlarged copy of the poem.

For older students, I would challenge them to highlight all the compound words they can find on their copies of the poem.  Using a pencil, rather than a marker, is a good idea should they mistake a multisyllabic word for a compound. 

Using an example from the poem above, “believe” may seem like a compound word to some readers.  However, when you cut it apart, it becomes clear that it is not, in fact, 2 smaller words. Spelling counts!  (lieve vs leave) 

In my next post, I’ll describe skill lessons that poetry readily proffers.

Resources you may like: