poetry breaks

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poetry breaks
By Pam McWhorter

While taking a graduate course on "teaching poetry to children", I began integrating poetry into every content area I could. We started with a poem a week. On Monday, the poem was introduced during their handwriting time.
The students wrote the poem and put it into their poetry folders. Immediately following their silent reading time, we had our poetry break. This time consisted of reciting the poem of the week, independently, as a class etc. We did a lot of fun things with the choral readings, the variations are limitless. During the poetry break a student also shared a poem by reading it to the class.

This was a favorite, I always had students signed up for sharing two to three weeks in advance. AT first the poetry breaks were about five minutes long. They got longer as our repetoire increased. Students were excited about reciting past poems etc. STruggling readers were finally successful readers with the predictable text of the poems. If you need anymore ideas please let me know. I could go on forever about the benefits of poetry in the classroom. I love it!