Regardless of the activity, my kindergartners are participating during our poetry time. No beauty shop here… yes, braiding hair can be fun, but EVERYONE needs to participate in the activity. We also do word sorts to support phonemic awareness. (This is the included student response page.) You can add these poems to your literacy centers as well. In kindergarten, we do concept sorts (included in the poetry units). These activities are from the interactive poetry notebook component of my poetry units. As you can see, at the beginning of the year, my kindergarten students really focus on beginning skills. As the school year progresses, we get to the more rigorous language skills. Then students can circle capital letters, find a certain letter or the sight word of the week. A copy of the poem goes into their poetry folder or notebook. Poems in Kindergarten: EVERYBODY participates!Īs we introduce each new poem, we also do some word work. It is an easy way to display the poems in different ways. We also have a single page that allows you to display the entire poem on interactive whiteboards or under a document camera. Other students can handle this task independently. Sometimes we need to offer more support so we work hand-over-hand with the student. Student helpers are always brought forward to lead us. Towards the end of the year, we simply point to the line we are reading. Then we gravitate towards sliding the pointer underneath the words during shared readings. Using a variety of pointers is a great way to help students track print from left to right.Īt the beginning of the year, students start by pointing to each word as they read the poem.

We use enlarged print in the poems because it allows the students to focus on the print during our whole class lessons. “If are going to learn to love poetry, need to feel it and enjoy the language first…Young children respond to rhymes, chants, and songs (not properly called poetry according to scholars, but an important foundation for appreciating poetry.” Poems in Kindergarten Means Enlarged Print for Shared Reading *In the primary grades, we don’t dive too deep into poems that need complex interpretation. However, I remember suffering through these PAINFUL poetry lessons when I was in high school. They made my head hurt. Here is what Fountas and Pinnell had to say,

decipher the figurative language in poetry.

Students must deploy numerous skills to navigate poetry: So the question really should be, “What are the academic benefits of poetry?” The demands of poetry So ditch those big books and be ready for some shared reading fun! How do poems help children? There are so many literacy skills kindergarten teachers can teach with poems.

Each week we would learn an original poem and practice it all week. We loved using our poetry for shared reading.

Kindergarten graduation songs and poems