How to Use Poetry to Improve Reading Fluency in 1st Grade

Do you use poetry? When I started teaching first again, it had been 12 years since I had taught it last. I had kind of forgotten about using poetry. One of my team members was getting her masters in reading and had to present an insevice to us. She talked about poetry being used for fluency and it all came back to me.

When I student taught, my cooperating teacher gave me a binder full of poems. Granted this was in 1999 but I'm still using some of them. I've also downloaded some from Teachers Pay Teachers and used some of my finger plays and songs from preschool to add to my collection. I write one in my lesson plans for each day. But sometimes we don't have time at the end of morning meeting or sometimes we have time for more than one.  By spring, they were signing up to read poems aloud to the class. Such good fluency practice! I did not make everyone sign up to read aloud but I don't think anybody didn't to do it and some wanted to do several. I try to pick shorter poems for this reason. 

I bought a karaoke machine on eBay for use this year. I'm calling it Open Mic time and they sit in the Readers Chair. There were several that spoke so softly, we couldn't hear which led to losing interest and rude behavior so I'm hoping the microphone will help with that. I did stress and will stress more that if you are going to sign up to read aloud, you have to practice it. I think I'll have them make a symbol for each time they read it to practice before they can read it to the class. What do you think? 5 times?

Some of my favorite poems are from Elizabeth Hall and Miss DeCarbo.

They are super cute and some have tunes to sing them too which the kids love even more. I'm a pretty good singer ;)