You will learn how to use a poetry notebook to teach reading skills.
Poetry Notebook – A Paper Saver!
I remember hearing my very first principal, 25 years ago (yikes!), telling the entire staff that we could not use worksheets for the whole year. Apparently copy paper wasn’t in the budget. 🙂 Ok, this was just crazy because it was my first year of teaching, it was the early 90’s, and worksheets were kind of a “teacher’s jam”. The entire staff was going nuts and I was about to cry.
To make a very long story short, I started using composition notebooks and having my students write in them… the same kind of stuff that we would have done on worksheets. I kept using this idea, and over the years it morphed into what most people refer to as interactive notebooks these days.
What can I do with a poetry notebook for elementary students?
Interactive Poetry Notebooks are perfect for teaching fluency, sight words, phonics, and my favorite… COMPREHENSION! That’s right. Comprehension. I’ll show you how in a bit. But first, let’s set up the poetry notebook.
Setting up a poetry notebook with your kiddos is super simple!
The first thing you need to do is gather up either spiral notebooks or composition books for students to add their interactive poetry notebook pieces. Students can decorate their poetry notebook covers.
NOTE: If you work at a lower income school, you may want to use the spiral notebooks they tend to be just a tad cheaper and are a little easier for parents to find at the store.
If you are working with kindergarten or first grade students, I don’t recommend using a table of contents, but if you think your students can handle it, go for it!
Interactive Poetry Notebook: Use a Table of Contents
For second graders and older, the first few pages should include a table of contents. Go ahead and use two or three designated pages for the table of contents. Include the title of the poem and the page it is glued to. Your students will need to number off the pages in their notebook so they will easily be able to flip to a certain poem and also so you the table of contents will work correctly.
Now, you may be wondering if you should use nursery rhymes with third graders, fourth graders, fifth graders… YES! You will mainly focus on comprehension, but there are so many ways to use nursery rhymes with older students. They secretly LOVE them!
The free nursery rhyme poems included in this freebie include two poems to a page to save printer ink and paper. You simply cut the sheet in half before passing them out to your students. They are the perfect size for the poetry notebooks.
Click here to keep reading and download your Poetry Notebook FREEBIE!
This blog post was originally posted on TeacherKarma.com.
Thank you! Jen 😉
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