A poetry strategy that works for upper elementary

When our standards changed and poetry was suddenly really important, a lot of us had to re-evaluate our approach. Poetry was being tested on our STAAR test in more and more complex ways, and so students were being held accountable for more than simply loving poetry.

I loved reading poetry with kids and having awesome discussions about the language, message, and the poet. But when it came down to it, without my guidance, kids just didn't know where to start when reading poetry.

They'd read the title, fumble through the stanzas, find some figurative language, and have absolutely no idea what the poem was about.

I knew this wouldn't work. How could I help kids use a consistent approach to poetry so they'd know where to start to comprehend a poem?

I spoke to several experts, and something that kept coming up was the SOAPSTONE strategy used for high school and college students. You might remember using it in school yourself. It's a handy acronym that helps students identify the essential elements of the poem.


My colleague and I decided to create something similar for our upper elementary students, and so POETS was born!

The POETS acronym stands for the following. We color-coded each part so students would have a visual connection to these elements:

Preview (black - pencil)
Occasion (green)
Emotions (red)
Theme (blue)
Speaker (yellow)

When students are faced with a poem, they use the POETS acronym to understand the poem and summarize what it's about! Here's how it works:

Preview
This step takes the longest. Students do several things to get their brain ready to think deeply about the poem.
1. Read title, notice illustrations
2. Number lines & stanzas
3. Read a stanza at a time, make a sketch of the details in that stanza
4. Find the rhyme scheme by noticing pattern of rhyming words
5. Identify the type of poem: narrative, lyrical, free verse, etc.

Occasion
In this step, students identify what the topic of the poem is, or what the poem is all about. What is happening that the poet is writing about? In a narrative poem, the occasion is the story the poet is telling. In a lyrical poem, the occasion is the topic the poet is describing.

Emotions
Poetry is chock-full of emotions; many of them inferential. Students hunt for evidence that can help them infer the emotions in the poem.

Theme
This is the most challenging part! In this step, students look for clues to help them conclude the theme. What is the message the poet is sharing with the reader? (In a humorous poem, there might not be a deep message! It's hard to take away a life lesson for "Be Glad Your Nose Is On Your Face".)

Speaker
This is so important that I actually have students do this step right after the Preview step. In this step, students identify the point of view the poem is told from (1st person, 3rd person limited/omniscient), and they figure out who the speaker is. Whose voice is speaking in the poem?


Get em' engaged!

To help kids get used to the POETS strategy, I tried out a little engagement strategy with our most reluctant readers. Each student received a copy of the poem. They were asked to complete the "P" on their own (Preview). Then, I gave each student a different-colored post-it. I used the four colors that we used to color-code our POETS strategy: blue, green, red, and yellow. Whatever color the student received was the element of POETS that they had to hunt for.

Using their colors, they got into expert groups and marked evidence for their element. They wrote their answer statement on the post-it. Then they went back to their home groups and took turns teaching their element to their home teams.

Afterwards, I randomly called on students to come to the charted poem in the front of the room and share their evidence. They used their post-it to mark the line they found their evidence in.

To add to the challenge of the next round, I took the title off of the poem. Students used the POETS strategy to decide what the poem was all about, and then they came up with a title for the poem. They loved this lesson! They were each adamant that their own title was the best!

Over time, and after aligning this strategy 3-5, our students have started to show an improved confidence in reading poetry. They know where to start, what to look for, and how to help themselves! It's actually become one of their strengths!

In case you're looking to try out this new strategy, I have provided a day-by-day guide for introducing it to your class, complete with questioning, in my Teaching Reading by Genre product on TPT!

       

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Camp Write-a-Lot STAAR Writing Test Prep & Review

Test, test, test, blah, blah, blah. It seems like that's all we hear this time of year. Underline your evidence. Mark out unlikely choices. Check your bubbles. Blah, blah, blah. Tests are boring. There's no way around it.

We don't have much wiggle room when it comes to giving state-mandated tests, but we do have a choice in how we prepare for them! Last year, my teachers and I talked about this during PLC and decided we wanted an engaging, stress-free review for kids.

That's why I put together this camping-themed Texas State Writing test prep and review to help students get ready for their big writing test in a fun and engaging way. It's also important to help reduce kids' (and your!) stress about the big day of the test.

Kids love (and remember)  hands-on, interactive activities that require them to figure things out and actively apply their learning. I wanted to balance that with making sure that they had practice in the important areas they'd be tested on. 

Setting the Scene

Some teachers decorated the hallways or their classrooms with cute butcher paper cut-outs of trees, rivers, and bushes. Wearing a cap or visor and a whistle adds a little camping-themed fun to the day! I'd also recommend reading aloud a fun camping book, such as A Camping Spree with Mr. Magee to get your day started in a camping frame of mind!

Moving Through the Stations

We did our test prep review the day before our big test. We took the whole day and used it to go through some fun, hands-on writing stations! Every student got a fun paper bracelet with an image for each station on it. As they completed a station, we used a hole puncher to mark them!

Another easy way to record the stations is with a punch card, or a signature card. Other teachers in the grade level used these cute badges to show which stations the kids had completed. As they finished the station, they colored in the icon on the badge and they glued it on their badge sheet. (My personal preference was the bracelet :)

If you have a group of teachers who'd like to do this fun activity with you, you can each take a station and have kids move from class-to-class to accomplish them. If not, it's just as fun in your own classroom!

Camping Stations!

We had ten engaging stations to get through on our fun camp day. These are some of my favorites!

Sentence Sort

 

One skill that's necessary for both revision and editing is being able to identify complete sentences, run-ons, and fragments. I recorded a ton of each of these phrases and sentences on sentence strips and had kids sort them into those three categories. 

In the complete sentence category, I tried to include simple, compound, and complex sentences so students had practice in reviewing each of those sentence types. 

     

Revision Station

 

For this station, I wrote several boring compositions on chart paper. I tried to do a lot of the things kids do that make their writing uninteresting: repeating lines and words, having little development, unoriginal details. 

Students were tasked to revise the composition using more interesting details and sentences. They were challenged to use the skills they had learned all year to make this piece of writing engaging and convincing to the reader. 

As you can see, this piece is still under construction, but students have begun to think about using different types of sentences and specific language. 

     

Editing Station

Do your kids love using dry-erase markers? Mine always do! For this editing station, I wrote sentences on sentence strips. In each sentence there was one specific error, whether it was spelling, capitalization, punctuation, or grammar. I laminated the sentence strips and had students use dry-erase markers to make the corrections to each sentence. Bonus points if you have kids sort the sentences by the error afterward: capitalization, spelling, grammar, or punctuation?

  

Using Transitions 

One area that students often need practice in is using transitions meaningfully. I decided this was important enough to merit its own station!

For this station, I wrote a couple compositions on chart paper, but I left out the transitional phrases, instead marking a blank line where they belonged. I wrote the missing phrases (and a few extra ones) on some sentence strips. 

The kids worked in partners to figure out which sentence strips belonged in the composition to improve the flow! They used a little piece of tape to stick them on. You could also laminate the chart paper to re-use next year, or for the next group!

   

Build-a-Composition

In this station, kids have to engage a lot of different revision skills to create a composition out of sentences. This can easily be written on sentence strips, but I typed this one out and cut it up so we could do it in a small group setting with teacher support.  I wanted to use this as an opportunity to review and apply the revision language we'd been using during our writing lessons!

Kids figured out the organization of the composition and then sequenced the details in an order that made sense. This station might be my favorite because it requires so many skills!

 

These are just a few of the fun stations we used to review and get ready for our big STAAR Writing test. It was a fun day, even though the stressful test was on its way! We can't change the test, but we can change the way we prepare for it!

Want to grab a freebie from this resource? Enter your email address for a freebie sent right to your inbox! You'll also get some great writing tips and resources!

What's the best part of all these stations? They can easily be made with markers, sentence strips, chart paper, and dry-erase markers! But if you're looking for a ready-made Camp Write-a-Lot, look no further! Get these stations and more at my TPT store!

 
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