Poetry

Unit 4 - Poetry

A unit on poetry is an opportunity to re-energize Readers’ Workshop. In this unit, children will develop a love of poetry. Through strategic read-aloud, you will model how to notice and interpret poetic moves in prose (prose is a form of language that exhibits a grammatical structure and a natural flow of speech, rather than a rhythmic structure as in traditional poetry). Students will then have a chance to practice this skill with their own independent reading units. In this unit, you will encourage children to create their own meanings from poems, pushing them to ponder a poem’s bigger meaning and asking, “What do those lines mean to me, in my life?” The unit begins with children comparing and contrasting several poems to get a sense of the diversity of breadth of the genre. The unit then moves onto specific teaching points for meaning making and interpretation.