Teaching cross curricular with poetry is so fun! It is so easy to implement in your classroom!
Another amazing component of Balanced Literacy is Focus Poetry. With poetry, you can teach so many different skills: fluency, rhyming words, parts of speech, creating mental images, comprehension, author’s purpose, rhythm, grammar, and conventions. And best of all, my poem is related to my thematic unit so I can still teach cross curricular!
I have a poetry center in my classroom with my Focus Poem up on the bulletin board. On each side of the bulletin board, I made index cards with parts of speech words or punctuation words. I staple them together to make a ladder. I call these my Parts of Speech or my Punctuation Ladders. I use these cards to spiral skills with each poem.
I change my poem every week. So, whatever my theme is for science or social studies, my poem correlates. For example, if my theme is Oceans, then my poem will be about Whales. If my theme is about Texas, then my poem will be about Cowboys or Texas. If my theme is Martin Luther King, then my poem is about dreams. This is an easy way to teach cross curricular for sure! Here is a picture of my poetry center with my focus poem.
Focus Poetry:
At the beginning of the week, I read the poem to my students, and then we do a shared reading together. Students can either sit at their desks or sit on the floor, whichever you prefer. I even call on some students to come up and share the pointer to read the poem with us. You could even have the students have the poem at their desks or in their laps so they can practice reading with you.
Step by Step:
My students and I read the poem about 4 times to practice fluency, rhyming, and rhythm of the poem. If it’s a song… then we SING! After we read the poem, then we go over the Punctuation Ladder. We count all the periods, commas, exclamation points, capitals, colons, ellipses, and many others. We also read it with different voices: silly, accents, or sing!
Then, we go through the Parts of Speech ladder which has rhyming words, nouns, verbs, adjectives, contractions, compound words, and many others. I ask the students to help me find these words and they put their thumbs up if they see them.
We do this for about 5 minutes. I give them the challenge to find a certain word in the story to highlight. It may be verbs, contractions, rhyming words, or whatever skill of the week I want to focus on. Hence the name Focus Poetry! Whatever skill I’ve already taught, we review with our poem. Each week we highlight something different: nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, adverbs, etc… But I make sure that I’ve already taught it during my grammar lessons in Writer’s Workshop.
Last, I tell my students to close their eyes and Visualize their mental image in their head about the poem. I tell them that poems also have a message and purpose that the author wants to send- entertain, describe, explain, persuade or inform. So, we talk about the message and what it means to us. Then, I have my students share out loud what they will illustrate, or turn and tell each other. This will help those low babies get some ideas of what to illustrate.
Now on to the fun part!
Meanwhile, hand out a copy of the poem on colored construction paper, and the students cut it out. They take out their red poetry journal and glue their poem on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side, they illustrate a beautiful picture that they created a mental image for in their mind. At the bottom of their illustration, they write a caption… “I drew…. or I illustrated” depending on the time of year. Around their poem, they illustrate a border with a marker.
Here’s the anchor chart that I made for borders:
Here is an example of my students’ focus poetry journal:
Poetry Center:
My poetry center is also a big hit in my classroom. I have a tub full of poetry books and focus poetry notebooks for my students to look at. I have a glass jar of pointers so they can practice reading the big poem on the wall. I also have a pocket chart on the side of the desk with holiday poems to read.
If you are interested in seeing more of my focus poetry and acrostic poems, then click here. I have instructions, materials, and poetry to last you the whole school year for all the holidays and seasons. The poems are in color and black and white! There are also big poems to make for your poetry center!
Ladders for Poetry:
Here are some examples of the Parts of Speech and Punctuation Ladders:
Here are some examples of colored poems- you can display them on your document camera to your smartboard, or run them through your poster maker to display on your poetry center!
Now you know how to teach cross curricular using poetry! If you’re interested in reading about a day in first grade, check out my blog post here.
If you’re interested in my YouTube video of my Focus Poetry center, click here.
Happy Teaching!
