Teaching ELA Standards with Poetry

I don't know about you but I LOVE using poetry in my room!!

We use it for so many different skills.You can teach so many different ELA standards; fluency, phonics, grammar, and more! Who says you need to always have a worksheet or printable (newest term for ditto) to teach kids?? Incorporate the learning! This is the best thing I have seen come out of NOT using the Reading Series - linking it all!

I usually do a poem for each them (our theme for the week) and a poem for the phonics skill for the week...

No matter what kind of poem we are doing, we always do fluency practice... I read, we read, partner read, then they read as a class without me...

*-

You can see how I have my desks set up - to where each kid either has an A or a B... whenever they partner read, I always break up the poem and then tell them who goes first (either A or B) and when they read it through the 2nd time, the opposite letter starts. If I have an odd man out, then I become their partner... they LOVE being the odd man out.

And every poem we do, we always do a visualization activity. I print up the poems into half pages, so they glue it to the left side of the journal and on the right side, they illustrate the poem. They get SO good at it!

Sometimes we use the poems for grammar lessons... like our firefighter poem we just did... we used it to help us with adjectives and nouns.

Notice, we also practiced a nonfiction standard - labeling!

Sometimes we use them for sight word searches!

ok... Most of the time we go on a Sight Word Hunt...

Here's what my phonics poems look like...

I take poems from phonics books I have and retype them in this format... and we use it throughout the week for various activities...and visualizing!

Some of my favorite poetry writers that I've found on TpT are Rowdy in First Grade's monthly poetry and Fun in First Grade (Jodi) has TONS of poetry in her Fluency packs and her Sight word poetry, I also love using DeeDee's Monthly Poetry Packs. 

Here are some of my favorite phonics poetry books that I use, and retype the poems...

Each month, we always put our Journal covers and table of contents in our journals... I just like separating the poems out and keeping them somewhat organized, you know?? PLUS this is just another way to teach about parts of Nonfiction - table of contents! #winwin You can grab the Poetry Covers and table of contents for free {HERE}.  

Check out my other poetry posts I've written {HERE} and {HERE}

I've also made a Phonics Poetry Schedule, which could be tweaked a little for thematic poetry too! Click the picture to down load it.

Do you have any favorite poetry resources?? I would love to add more to my list of resources!

8

All About Worms!

Last week, we did one of my favorite themes - worms! The kids always love this theme too.  We started it off with our small groups reading from the Reading A to Z books.  As soon as they saw the cover they got all excited. I love that. Excited to learn. Imagine that.

In our whole group, we read a few different books. Here some of the books we read during the week.

As we read, we added details to our planning page. Then, we wrote our "sloppy" copy for our "All About Worms" writing activity.

We also compared Diary of a Worm and Wonderful Worms. This picture doesn't show it, but we found a LOT of ways they were similar...and of course how they were different. They kept finding ways that the fictional book was still true. 

Awesome!

We also made a worm habitat!  They wrote out the steps of "How to Build a Worm Habitat."

Then we made it!

We made our first observation. They were so excited that even after one day, there were all kinds of different tunnels.

Then, today we did the 2nd observation.

The poem in my Worm pack lends itself nicely to reviewing adjectives

Our skill this week was measurement.  I started off by reading Inch by Inch by Leo Lioni

Then we read our Inchworm's Trip poem. It came from {THIS} book.

Then I passed out some worms for everyone to measure.  I love using these worms. These are the worms that we used.

 

The next day, the kids got to use the worms to measure different items in the class.

This activity comes from my All About Worms pack. If you don't have a bucket of these worms in your class, I included some worms in the pack that you can print and laminate to use for this activity.

He was totally amazed that it took that many worms - ha!

Then it was time to break out the rulers!

By the end of the week, I was able to conference with the kids on their sloppy copy writing so they could write their neat copy. While the writing activity comes from my All About Worms pack, the oh-so cute craft comes from Rowdy in Room 300- her worm glyph pack.

6