You have your list of standards, the year is getting shorter, and you wonder how you can ever fit it all in. Here is a little secret – use poetry. Poetry is a great way to get through all of those standards and easily assess student understanding. (Please note, this post contains Amazon affiliate links.)
Why You Should Teach Poetry All Year Long
It’s short. It is less intimidating for readers than a chapter book. Especially for those students who struggle with reading. Poetry gives them the chance to succeed without getting too far behind.
A lot of poetry for kids has rhythm and rhyme. This helps with fluency. Struggling readers can find success by learning the rhythm of the poem.
You can quickly hit the standards. Some times you just have standards you need to cover or review and with a poem you can quickly address these standards. Need a little help planning your poetry unit? Check out this Poetry Page that has tons of FREEBIES and other resources.
Poetry breaks the rules. Kids like that they don’t have to follow the rules with poetry. They can just write without the fear of indenting, capitalization, or punctuation. Free verse is a fantastic way to get kids writing. Love that Dog by Sharon Creech is a great read aloud to use for modeling free verse poetry.
Some poetry is really, really funny. There are some really great, funny poets for kids. The kind of poems where your kids are practicing fluency and memorizing the poems because they can’t get enough of it. And I’ll be honest, I have read or recited Crowded Tub for 34 years and I still get a chuckle.
You can assess understanding of figurative language quickly. If they laugh or smile, or have that ah-ha moment, they get it. You will find a lot of figurative language in poetry. This article contains a FREE figurative language QR code activity.
It’s easy to transform and use as a model. Writing transformations of other pieces of writing is a great way to help students with structure and organization. Using great poets as models can help take the guess work out of writing poetry. This post will teach you more about using transformations. This article HERE will guide you through teaching students how to write transformations.
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