Giveaway Winner and Poetry Freebie

Congrats to my Versatiles winner, Lorina!!  I'll be sending you an email to make sure you get your prize!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I'm almost at 600 followers!  So exciting!  To celebrate all of you, I would like to share with you my poetry book cover.

I love teaching poems, chants, and songs to my class.  We sing songs about social studies content, chants about science conent, and read poems about reading strategies.  We sing songs before we leave the room, and songs about the days of the week.  We say chants abot the plant life cylce and chants about our home state, Hawaii.  We love it all!

I make my students a poetry book each year.  Each book has about 50 blank white pages in it with a cardstock cover and back.  I use a heavy duty stapler to adhere it, but a comb bind would work, as well.  Kids keep these in their book boxes so they can read them during Read to Self time to build fluency through repeated reading.  I also try to find recordings of the songs and chants or record my own students singing or chanting them to put on out class iPods.  Kids love listening to the songs and chants during reading centers.

I introduce one poem a week by doing call and response for each line.  We then practice singing it altogether.  I copy off the poem for each student so they have it in front of them as we are learning it.  Some need that visual cue.  We then talk about what the poem means.  Did we learn a new concept?  We we learn a new poetic element (rhyme, alliteration, etc), did we practice a skill we already knew?  Then the students sketch and label their pictures of what the poem taught them.  This is a OCDE Project GLAD® (Guided Language Acquisition Design) strategy, but it also ties in nicely with Marzano's vocabulary program.

Speaking of OCDE Project GLAD®, I love to use academic poems when I can.  Here is a freebie I made for you to help you get started with poetry books in your classroom.  Have so much fun!

What poems would you put in your poetry book?