Daily Schedule for Poetry Notebooks

Poetry notebooks are an excellent way to display and organize a collection of poems for kids. If you’re wondering how to get started with, a daily schedule, and what’s included with poetry notebooks, I’ve got you covered!  Let’s take a look at one of my favorite teaching tools!

Start with a Free Poem of the Week Guide

Start building your poetry collection with FREE Poetry resources! You can get  my FREE guide on using poems to build language and reading fluency! This guide includes a poem of the week checklist, daily schedule, free printables, and a lucky listener form to get started.  I am so excited to share my love of poetry with you, and know you will love using poetry in the classroom, too.

Why I Love Poetry Notebooks

If you’re a teacher, you know curriculum programs often come and go; it’s a constant race to see which yields higher test results. It is important to keep up with research and try new strategies.  However, it is equally important to maintain successful strategies and routines that you have implemented over the years. Poetry notebook has been the ONE teaching tool I’ve found to be successful, year after year!

How to Use Poetry Notebooks

First, choose how you would like to store your poems. For example, poetry notebooks can be in a spiral notebook, prong folder, or three ring binder.  Next, you will want to create a schedule, or a designated time, to use poetry notebooks.  While the designated time stays the same from day to day, the poetry activities and learning outcomes change each day.

From Build-a-Poem pocket chart activities, to highlighting key vocabulary, there are many ways to integrate your poem each day of the week.  .

Poem of the Week Schedule

Each week, your kiddos will learn a new poem.  This poem-of-the-week technique keeps the kids excited to read and provides structure to help your planning and instruction easier!

Mondays

Tuesdays

Tuesdays are for focusing on a skill.  For example, rhyming, vowel patterns, punctuation, vocabulary, etc.  I first do a mini-lesson as a whole group, then ask the students to look over their poem to find examples of whichever skill we’re working on.  Next, we highlight the words that demonstrate the focus skill.  Last, we do a shared reading of the poem.

Wednesdays

On Wednesdays, we incorporate hand motions and/or body movements.  If there are specific hand motions that I want to assure the kids learn, then I will teach it to them.  However, I also like to give the students opportunities to create and teach their own movements.  After learning the movements, we do an echo read followed by a read aloud led by a student.

Thursdays

Thursdays are all about the pocket chart poetry activities.  I use the Build a Poem activity to do a variety of activities.  For example, we build the poem together using the large print word cards. I then have the students turn around while I secretly remove 3-6 words from the poem.  Then, they have to figure out the missing words.

After our whole group lesson, I have the students work in centers.  Every week, I have a Build a Poem pocket chart poetry center ready to go for the kiddos.  This center, by far, is their favorite center!   Depending on your center rotation schedule, this center stays up until all groups get a chance to build the poem.  You can watch the video below to see how I set up Build a Poems, or read my blog post “All About Build a Poems“.

Fridays

On Fridays, the students get to add their printable poems to their poetry notebook.  Before adding the poem of the week, we recite the poem at the front of their binder.  This is the poem we worked on the previous week.

Either using the 3-hole punch feature on the copier, or the manual 3-hole puncher, I make sure to have the wholes punched before passing out the weekly poem.

The students then add the poem of the week to the front of their 1″ binders.

They are encouraged to neatly color the pictures, add additional details on the back, and read aloud to their friends while they work.  The students often break out in song while reciting the poems.  I love it!

Get your FREE Poem of the Week guide, full of strategies, resources, and printables, to get started with your poetry notebooks, today!

Get your free guide to learn how to get kids excited to read using poem and nursery rhymes.

Poetry notebooks have proven, year after year, to be an effective tool to teach reading.