TONS OF POETRY

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Archive : 2004 : August : 20

TONS OF POETRY
By HEIDI

Our school improvement plan last year was to include more poetry into daily work for our kids. So here are a couple of my suggestions:
I hids a ladybug piece of notepaper (laminated) in a student's desk each morning.
That is known as the poetry bug. If they catch the poetry bug, they get to not do D.E.A.R. time like normal. Instead, they get to go to a wall in the back of the room that has a variety of poems laminated and on velcro stuck helter skelter for them to choose from. They take one or several to their seats and read those for D.E.A.R. times. they love it because they are allowed to get

up and down as often as they like to swap poems. I change the wall for each season. It was a lot of work to copy the poems and put nice colour behind them before laminating, but well worth it.

ALso, I created centres where the kids get into more depth with longer poems. There are six laminated copies of the poem at the centre and six laminated instruction sheets. the instructions start with an activity that goes with KNOWLEDGE level thinking on bloom's taxonomy and they work up to the Synthesis and Evaluation levels. I taught students about the different kinds of thinking at the start of the year and posted a ladder with KNOWLEDGE on the bottom rung and a little stick man that we take off and stick whereevr is appropriate when I ask them a question. (We refer to it once in awhile just to remind them of what level I want in their answers). The centres work really well because the kids can work independently while I do a mini lesson or guided reading with another group. I can e-mail them to you if you'd like!

I love the poetry slam idea. I amy try that this year too!!!