Poem of the Week

Oooh August is just around the corner! How does summer always go by this fast? August is my reality check. Just being in Target yesterday and seeing all the back to school sales (and all the children running around with their back to school lists!) made me excited, nervous, and overwhelmed. I keep thinking how there is STILL SO MUCH TO DO! I have tons of pins still to try, a garage to clean out (so we can finally park in it!!), grout to seal shut, a house to clean (it's been at least 2 weeks now since I've vacuumed..), flowers to re plant (thanks boyfriend for killing our 2nd attempt at flowers while I was visiting Phoenix),  and files and files still to organize for school.

 By the way, it has somehow gotten worse since I last took this picture! There are way more stacks of things.. Hmm... that can't be good.

Thank goodness for my personal assistant Max!! He's the BEST paper weight. Ever.

Anyway, with all that, I decide to sit here and post, while drinking coffee (and Bailey's today!!).

But good news: I have accomplished week 3 of bootcamp (been going 5 days a week for 1 hour). I already feel stronger! At the beginning of camp I couldn't lift a 17lb weight from floor to ceiling without using 2 hands, now I can use 1 hand and do it repeatedly! I'm ecstatic that I can already feel a difference! Hoping that school won't get too much in the way of my workout routine. It's amazing how great I feel, and how much energy I have after!

Onto school related things!

Well one of my summer ideas was to do a poem of the week. I'd like to do this everyday after our morning meeting, for hopefully no more than 5-7 minutes.

Benefits: practice fluency, incorporate content areas, highlight sight words, practice rhyming, analyze poem, reading with expression, phonics focus.

Basically each day I plan on having 2 components to the poem of the week lesson. The first focuses on the fluency and actually reading of the poem, the second allows you to get involved with the words/phonics and the comprehension. Here are some different ideas you can do within each component. I plan to do one from each everyday.

1st component - Read the poem, practice fluency in a variety of ways:

• Split the class up in various ways and read the poem by it's pattern ABAB, ABBA. Example: girls read A, boys read B.Can do by shorts, pants, table numbers, favorite colors, the possibilities are endless!
• I read You Read
• Act it out with hand gestures while reading
• Read in silly voices: monster, hold nose, like you just sucked in helium from a balloon, etc
• Read with feelings: what sort of emotion does the poem have?
• Read sight words/phonics sounds/rhyming words LOUD, or do some sort of clap, stomp, etc.
• Have indv partners/table practice and then present it/lead the poem one day out of the week.

2nd component - Word work/Comprehension

•  highlight sight words
• highlight words that follow phonics learned this week or earlier in the year.
• highlight rhyming words
• identify pattern and rhythm of poem
• illustrate the poem
• compare contrast poem to last weeks
• highlight vocabulary
• retell the poem in your own words.
• complete a story map for the poem
• can focus on the comprehension strategy you are currently learning!

Now this is absolutely new to me, and I have NEVER tried it before, but here's what I'm thinking a possible rough schedule might be.

Monday (fluency focus)	Teacher Reads it Aloud, Then choral read as a class. Learn meter/rhythm, highlight sight words, intro phonics sound for the week (pick one)
Tuesday (fluency focus)	Read girls vs. boys, pants vs. shorts, etc. Read line by line Learn meter/rhythm, highlight sight words, rhyming words (pick one)
Wednesday (comp focus)	Read by acting it out with hand gestures, comprehension Discuss feeling of poem, what's happening, comp strategy.
Thursday (comp focus)	Read with expression and feeling. Be the poem. Illustrate poem.
Friday	Final read with expression and acting: think reader's theater. Announce poetry race winner. They recite poem to class or another class of choice

One thing I am extremely excited about is the Poetry Race component! Basically once the poem is introduced on Monday, students take the poem home and have this copied on the back side:

This AWESOME file did not come from me, but I found it at proteacher. Click HERE to go to the post, and here to DOWNLOAD. You must have a proteacher account (well worth it if you don't!!!). It even comes with an awesome letter to send home to families explaining the Great Poetry Race.

They have until Friday to read the poem to as many adults as they can and get them to sign their name and date. They can do it over the phone, can read to adults at school, adults at home, etc. We'd have to go over being safe and not going around their neighborhood to read to strangers. Many of my students live in apartments and I could see this happening.

On Friday they will turn in their poetry race papers, and I (or maybe my teacher's assistant!) will tally up the results and announce the winner! That person will get one of my stuffed animals that has a little poetry sash as a trophy to keep for the day.

I'm not sure if I LOVE the phrasing on the sash. Does anyone have some cute catchy phrases? PLEASE! :)

They'll also take home one of these cute little awards! Use them if you'd like to implement the poetry race, or just get blank ones!

Click here to download for FREE!

My only worries about it is what if the same student keeps winning each week? Or what if a student doesn't have access to many adults at home? Should they be able to count the same person each day, rather than just once that week?

I also haven't decided if I want to focus on poems following our phonics sound of the week, or if I want to go with poems that relate more to content area/comp strategy of the week/holiday. I'm thinking I will go with the latter, and if there are words that follow our new or old phonics sounds, we can highlight them. Thoughts on this? I really would love some advice!

Some great resources for more poem of the week:

 Awesome list of poems with phonics.

Great upper elementary poem of the week.

 Poem of the week that incorporate the phonic sound of the week. Great blog!