FOCUS POETRY

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. 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 Mockingbirds. If my theme is Martin Luther King, then my poem is about dreams. Here is a picture of my poetry center with my focus poem. 

Focus Poem: Dreams

Poetry Center

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, which ever you prefer. We read it 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.
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 it.
We do this for about 5 minutes.
Last, I give them a challenge to find a certain word in the story to highlight. It may be verbs, contractions, rhyming words, or whatever the skill is of the week I want to focus on. Hence the name Focus Poetry!
I 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 in 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 marker. I show them different borders that I want them to illustrate. Here's the anchor chart that I made for borders:

Here is an example of my students' focus poetry journal:

If you are interested in seeing more of my focus poetry and acrostic poems, then click on my Focus Poetry Packet. I have instructions, materials and poetry to last you the whole school year for all the holidays and seasons. Enjoy!


Focus Poetry and Acrostic Poetry for all Seasons Grade 1-3


Love, Kara

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