Playing with Poems: Rules, Tools, and Games

Strategies

Listening and speaking requires comprehension of oral communications and delivery of oral communication. Students will practice delivery of oral communication by memorizing and reciting poems. "The National Anthem" and the "Star Spangle Banner" are poems they will practice and perform as a group, so the students get comfortable when speaking in class. Another strategy is to watch videos to help guide students with fluency speaking and porosity. The next step of reciting poetry is get students to perform individually. Individual performances will begin with nursery rhymes because I want to students to get familiar with the rhythm of nursery rhymes.

Developing vocabulary is an important skill that can be developed during listening and speaking. Many of the strategies I use in this unit are from Marcia Brechtel's book, Bringing it All Together. One strategy to develop vocabulary skills is vertical sentence. The vertical sentence strategy requires students to identify words they do not know in a poem. The students will find synonyms and replace it with unknown words. The students will then recite the poem with the new synonym words. Vertical sentence also helps with comprehension. Another strategy for vocabulary development is the cognitive content dictionary (CCD). CCD dictionary, students divide a sheet of paper into four columns. The first column is for unknown words and word study like syllabication, word origins, affixes, and other word forms. In the second column, students predict the definition of the unknown word and use cognition (to think about how they connect to the unknown word). This column is especially important for students to develop the ability to look for context clues and a quick sketch helps students with imprinting the meaning. In the third column, students look up definition in a dictionary or on the internet. Students write the definition in terms they understand and remember, whether they use examples of pictures, or write down definition. In the final column, students write a sentence using the word.

Reading with fluency and accuracy are important skills for ELL students. Students are expected to read unfamiliar text with accuracy, appropriate phrasing, and attention to punctuation. An important strategy to help develop fluency and accuracy is to model reading. I model reading by reading every book and poem in this unit two to three times. Then I will choral read the text with students as a whole group, small group, and one on one. Echo reading is a fun strategy I use with the students or they practice with a partner. During echo reading, I will read a line in a familiar poem like "Mary had a Little Lamb," and the students will read the same line. Keep echoing until the poem is completely read. A variation to this strategy requires the first reader to change their voice like read in a deep voice, and the second reader copies the deep voice. I want the students to play with poems and reading passages to be familiar with the rhythm of reading with fluency and accuracy. Eventually, I want students to read independently using the acquired skills.

Comprehension in reading is also required. Using culture is especially important in developing comprehension skills because students will be able to make connection of text to self. Close reading is a great strategy for developing comprehension. During a close reading activity, students read a short passage or short story. The short story allows students to read the passage quickly, and may refer back to it to find answers. Reading books like Songs from the Loom ¹⁸ reveal how important rug weaving is to the Navajo culture. The Goat in the Rug ¹⁹ and Wisdom Weaver ²⁰ are short story that takes the readers through the process of shearing, washing the wool, spinning wool into yarn and eventually weave into a rug to show the care and pride of weaving a final product. The books are ideal for close reading because they are short and they support the unit by offering background information about weaving.

Writing is a difficult skill to develop with English Language Learners so I give the students ample opportunities to practice writing. Writing is hard to develop because students have trouble with Standard English conventions and structure. Students need to acquire grammar structure of the English Language to be proficient. Most students fail to meet proficiency standards because they perform poorly on the writing domain of ELP standards. Sentence Patterning Chart (SPN) strategy is a wonderful way to teach oral and written sentence fluency and grammar structure. Sentence Patterning Chart requires the use of a chart divided into columns. The first column is adjectives; the second is nouns, verb, adverb, and prepositional phrases. The sentence structures are manipulated into various sentence phrases and have the same meaning. I use the SPC with Farmer and the Dell chant and poetry frames to write poems. The Farmer and the Dell chant is strategy for practicing oral sentence fluency in poetry format. Using the SPC, students create a chant to the tune of Farmer and the Dell. The chant requires students to select two adjectives, one plural noun, one verb, one, adverb, and one prepositional phrase from SPC. Students sing the chant using adjective-noun in the first line, adjective-noun in the second line, adjective-adjective-noun-verb-adverb-prepositional phrase in the last line. For example, Farmer and Dell chant about a horse:

    Fast Horses,
    Strong Horses,
    Fast strong horses race quickly in the desert.
  

Using "Here There" poetry frame is an extension strategy used with the SPC to assist students with creating a simple poem. The poetry frame requires students to be familiar and be able to use parts of speech to create a poem using color coded parts of speech. For example, I created the following horse poem using "Here There" poetry frame using SPC.

    Horses
    Horses here, horses there,
    Horses, horses everywhere!
    Fast horse racing quickly,
    Strong horse working tirelessly,
    Black horse prancing proudly, and
    Wild horse bucking frantically.
    Horses in the desert,
    Horses in the meadow,
    Horses by the windmill, and
    Horses in the corral.
    Horses here, horses there,
    Horses, horses everywhere!