Poem of the Week…A Three Part Series PART ONE

A Poem of the Week is a fantastic routine to implement during your literacy block with young and emergent readers. It works for Pre-K students as well as Kindergarten, 1st grade, and 2nd grade.

I’ve been doing a poem or song of the week for my entire teaching career (mostly First Grade) and it’s one of my favorite and most important literacy activities I do. I have a LOT to say about it, so I’m breaking this post up into three parts.
Part One-The “Who, What, When, Where, Why, How” of Poem of the Week
Part Two-The Daily Activities for the Poem of the Week
Part Three-Response Activities and FREEBIES

PART ONE-The “Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How”

WHO?
We read our poem of the week each day during our whole group instruction time. Students keep a Poetry Journal with response activities of all of our poems throughout the year. I also place poem posters in our Poetry Station for students to read independently or in pairs during our Literacy Centers.

WHAT?
Together each day, we read, discuss, and complete other activities at our whole group meeting spot. We have seasonal poems, holiday, thematic, and others that we do throughout the year. We learn a new poem each week throughout the school year. Students then add them to their Poetry Journal. The poem posters go into a poetry reading station at the end of the week where kids can read independently or with a friend by hanging the poem on a hook and using a pointer to reread their favorite poems.

WHEN?
This takes 5-7 minutes during our Literacy Block each morning. It is part of our phonics and word work lessons before we begin our Literacy Stations and Guided Reading Groups. During our stations, students also have the opportunity to read from their journal or interact with the poems in our Poetry Station.

WHERE DO I GET THE POEMS?
My poems have come from all over! I’ve found poems in cute little poetry books, poems from a search of the internet, and poems shared with me by colleagues over the years. But, recently, I made a year long pack of seasonal and thematic poems and activities , so it’s all right there! Check it out if you’re in need!

Why?

Fluency improves every day with repeated practice
New vocabulary is encountered and clarified
Expression is modeled by the teacher and students use this as a scaffold to improve their own expression
Repeated reading of these familiar texts builds automaticity
Word wall/high frequency words are everywhere in these poems
Word families and other phonics chunks are encountered in an authentic reading activity
Builds confidence for my young readers
Can hit several language, reading and writing standards during weekly activities
Gives all students something familiar to read independently or with a partner
Leads to great discussion about spelling, punctuation, meaning and more
Makes fluency practice and word work fun
Students love the familiar weekly routine while discovering new poems each week

Our poems and songs become some of our very favorite reading materials. Even my very emergent readers can pick up on the rhythm and rhyme of our poems and then they feel like a reader, they can participate right along with the rest of us, and they have something they can read confidently on their own later.

However, my fluent readers love our poems just as much because we have fun with them, we learn new vocabulary and play with words a bit, it’s a classroom community activity that they can do with their friends, and rhythm, rhyme, and song is fun for all of us!

HOW?
For my display poems, I use poster board or cardstock, which I laminate both for durability and because we often use dry erase markers on them to circle or underline words, letters, rhymes, etc. You can use a standard size page or make a poster if you prefer!

The poem of the week hangs on the back of my teaching easel when not in use and on the front when we are reading it.
For their Poetry Journals, you can hand out the poems weekly as you introduce them and have students add them to their binder OR you can pre-assemble your poems for the year. I like the surprise of handing out the poems each week as we learn them, but it’s really up to you!