Using Poetry Notebooks to Practice ELA Skills

I’ve been super busy this summer updating every one of my TPT products and I just finished updating one of my very first products. I’m pretty excited about how it turned out.

My poetry binder has always been a best-seller for me, so I decided to update the clip art and formatting as well as add over 50 new poems based on suggestions from previous buyers. This poetry notebook now contains 80+ poems based on seasonal and science/social studies themes. So if you’ve previously purchased it, head on over to download a totally revamped version for FREE!

I love using a poetry binder in Kindergarten because you can use it to practice so many skills and it really helps emergent readers “read” before they are able to tackle leveled books.

I introduce one poem a week in my classroom based on the season, holiday or unit we are studying. I used to display the poem on chart paper but this past year, I started using my projector to display it on our interactive whiteboard which was great for saving paper and I loved that I could save the work we did on the poem as a class. Students each receive a copy and store them in a binder that they can pull out and read any time. We work on the poem for about 10-15 minutes a day.

My students’ favorite thing to do was illustrate their poems. I encourage listening for details in the poem and including as much as possible which really helps their drawings during writing as well. This is a huge help when we work on visualizing later in the year, because they realize they have been working on it all year long!

I love using the poems with my poetry study task cards to practice a variety of ELA skills. They are great for differentiating too, because I can give one group of kids one skill, and another group a different skill.