Poetry Workshop

Kids love reading poetry! I turned my reading workshop into a poetry workshop in April. I found lots and lots of poems online and in books. I copied the poems for the kids, and they had their own binder full of poems. Here are two charts that I made to help teach kids how to read poetry. Before doing any type of assessment in poetry, the kids had to learn how to read a poem. After spending a week on reading poetry, I did fluency assessments for three weeks. Kids shared poems to the class aloud independently and in groups. They had lots of fun. Along with the fluency assessments, we also reviewed comprehension strategies inferring and creating mental images.

Determining the Important Idea in Text

Determining the Importance comprehension strategy was a new one that I did this year! I had lots of fun with it too! While reading non-fiction, we practiced finding the "main idea" in text. Along with that, kids had to find important details that supported their idea. Here is chart that we created during the first few lessons. Before I gave students any type of assessment, I wanted to make sure that they were getting the idea down during their independent reading. On this chart, the kids had to write their "important sentence" on one sticky note. On the other side, they had to write two or three sentences that supported their important sentence. During share time, we went over the sticky notes in a large circle.