Poetry…. its never really been my cup of tea. Growing up I hated reading poetry. I always wondered why the author couldn’t just say what s/he meant. Yup…my attitude sucked the joy right out of it! That attitude also made me shy away from teaching “poetry” in my special education class. All of my students have language based disabilities and I thought poetry would be too abstract of a concept.
Guess what….WRONG!! We now have a poetry blocks 2 times a week and the kiddos love it! Each week we have 1 poem we work on that usually correlates with our theme. Here is the one we are currently working on:
This poem is one I found in an old teaching file. If anyone knows who to credit, please let me know!
Anyway, we start our poetry time by reading through the poem. After reading it aloud a few times we act the poem out. For this poem we made up movements for each line.
We work on reading and one to one correspondence as we take turns reading with pointers.
We also use a giant fly swatter that I cut a hole in to find letters, words, punctuation, etc.
The kids LOVE to use the over-sized swatter. Best of all…I found it at the dollar store!
Another poetry activity we do is match pictures to words in the poem.
As you can see, there are lots of different fun activities to do to help students of all levels enjoy and understand poetry…who knew?! LOL!!
I hope you have gotten some ideas of ways to bring poetry to life for your students. I would love to hear about what has worked in your classroom!
