Poetry for Little Readers

This year was a little different for me teaching TK instead of K. Not just in the fact that my students were almost a year younger, but my classroom setup was completely different and I had to make the most out of my chair pockets. In the past, I had always used binders for poetry. This year, we moved to folders and I am SO glad we did. The main reason was that I used page protectors instead of hole punching the poems. This helped poems getting ripped and falling out. They were also a lot easier to store.

I am all about simplifying things in my classroom and this was NO different! I needed different poems this year that would work a little better for my TK kiddos so I came up with a Poetry for Little Readers.

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 I was able to use some of my other poems and modified them. Some are poems that I have had and others I just plain made up. I needed something that was easy for the kids to remember and had a lot of sight words. I also included some nursery rhymes in this poetry unit because I feel like students become more confident readers when they are reciting (or “reading” to them) when it’s something familiar.

To store poems this year, I used folders and page protectors.  I used to use binders and found that the pages rip out of them easily and it would frustrate students. Once I taught the kids how to slide their poems in the page protectors, they seemed to get the hang of it.

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First thing we would do is highlight sight words we found in our poems. I would let the students hunt first and then we would go through it together.

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All of the poems have some kind of picture at the bottom so I would give them about 3-4 minutes to color the picture if we had enough time.

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Then, students would add it to their poetry folders and we would revisit it throughout the week as part of a warm-up for shared reading, guided reading, sight word review etc…however you want them to practice. The key to helping students become fluent readers is practice. Poetry is a great way to practice “roller coaster”  reading voices.

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 At the end of the week, I always have students practice together and then bring their poems home to share with their parents. I have a parent letter included in the unit if you do wish to send them home on Friday. I do it every week to make it a habit. If you send it home here and there it’ll never make its way back to school 🙂

Here is a sample of the unit that you can see here.

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Happy Reading!