Improving Reading Fluency with Poems - Bonnie Hannigan Miss H 2nd

As a 2nd grade teacher, I am always looking for creative ways to increase confidence and success with oral reading fluency.

I try to squeeze in practice wherever I can during our schedule, and this year using POEMS for morning work, was nothing short of magic.

This year, we had 15 minutes from the time the bell rings, for students to enter the building, put their things away, and take attendance before our specials began. I wanted to fit in some meaningful morning work but in that short amount of time, what would work?

Enter, the amazing Jen Jones with Hello Literacy and her Poems For All Year K-2. They fit perfectly in a composition notebook and have been the mainstay of our morning routine. The poems are black and white, come two to a page and are easy to prep. I simply copy them, cut the page in half, and sort by month, and voila, morning work is ready to go.

Just about every morning, there is a new poem waiting for my students as they enter the classroom. They love to see what the poem theme will be and get started working right away.

Our routine looks like this:

Glue poem into their notebook
Read poem 3x to a seat partner
Circle the rhyming words
Underline the nouns
Highlight the verbs

Not all of this gets finished but it is always the goal. This little bit of practice first thing in the morning has helped my students to increase their reading fluency and each and every one of them has shown amazing growth this year.

During read-aloud time students can color in the images if they choose and some mornings I will have students find their favorite poem and reread it to a seat partner. This year, I am going to add a tab near the back of the student books to incorporate the pages from my Parts of Speech Booklets resource. When students identify the parts of speech in their poems they can add them to the Nouns, Verbs, and Adjective pages. This makes our Mad Libs sessions more exciting with so many words to choose from!