Poetry is one of my favorite vehicles for teaching literacy in the primary grades. There are so many fun ways to use a poem, and the shortened format makes it more accessible to our youngest readers. Poetry can be used to improve:
Reading fluency through repeated readings
Reading expression
Sight word vocabulary
Phonological awareness
Word study skills
And much more!
Today, I’m going to talk about using poetry to teach word study. In many cases, like this one, it was such a natural next step!
We started today’s lesson with some echo reading (I read a line or two, and my 6 year old son, Hudson, repeated me, while following along with the text). Once we got through the text a couple of times, he read it himself a few times to practice reading fluently and with good expression. We also added in some fun movements - because moving is always more fun!! I encourage you to add movement into reading instruction whenever possible.
After reading, we moved onto some word study. I had initially planned to do word study later in the day, after he read his guided reading book, but this poem was the perfect segue into learning about the -ay word family, so we changed our plans.
Poetry as a vehicle for word study
We started by finding all of the rhyming words in the poem. Hudson circled them, and then we identified the spelling pattern together (-ay). We then took out our handy magnetic letter set and got to work creating more -ay family words on our magnetic dry erase board. I love magnetic letters for word study! They add a bit of extra fun to the activity as kids get to move them around and manipulate them. Hudson finished the word study practice by writing his words and a sentence using the words in his word study journal.
I hope you can join in on the poetry fun! For more engaging poems like the one shared above, you can purchase the book Perfect Poems: With Strategies for Teaching Fluency (Grades 1-2).
Happy Reading!
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