In March I wrote a post about the beauty of pocket charts. During my unit on poetry I have another way to use them! Last year, my teaching partner and I worked with our literacy specialist during our poetry unit, and she gave me a lot of great ideas.  Here is one of them (it can also be found in Luck Calkins book Poetry: Powerful Thoughts in Tiny Packages).

When you are teaching students how to create line breaks in poems take an example poem and write it in a paragraph form, like this:

Pay attention to the bottom half of the easel. (I am a big fan of chart paper, but because it is hard to come by in Korea, I also like to use laminated paper.)

Ask the students to help you create line breaks in the poem and mark them. Then have the words prepared on index cards and use a pocket chart to show the line breaks the students made:

Try the poem in a multiple ways, and have the students take turns reading it aloud. It is amazing how each student reads it in their own unique way! Model for them how you would read it.

You can also lay the words on the floor first and have the students move them, and then put them into the pocket chart. Another idea, have students write a poem on index cards and test it out in the pocket chart, to see where they want their line breaks, during center time.

I love poetry.