Poetry Differentiation

With poetry, my main goal is the kids learning fluency- reading that sounds like they talk with voice intonation.  Especially in 1st grade, kids are at many different reading levels.  I always start out by reading the poem whole group and having the kids "copy" my voice.  They keep a poetry notebook so that they always have the poems to read and look back on.  

One way you could differentiate is taking the poem and adding or taking out parts.  You could even have three different poems about snow, but have them leveled by reading ability.  In that case, I would give out the poem in groups maybe during reading group.  I don't prefer this unless there is a huge gap in ability because poetry is easily memorized and you could add pictures so give support so that all learners can have the same poem.

What I like to do is differentiate the activities that link to the poem.  I have the kids do poetry fill-in.  This activity guides their eyes to the parts I've been teaching:  hunks/chunks (ch/sh/th), vowel patterns (ai/ay/ou) or larger patterns (ough/ vowel-consonant-e/ igh).  Some students might not use the poetry notebook they keep and fill in the blanks by memory, others will use the support.  I can level the amount of fill-ins or change them based on what the students working on in reading group.

The last thing I like to add on for the students who need a challenge is add an activity that they can do on the back.  Currently, I'm giving them a word from the poem and they are to come up with adjectives that describe the word.  As you can see from the samples they can be extremely descriptive down to just using color words to describe.

 This is a sample from a child reading about level DRA 6:

 This is a sample from a child reading about level DRA 10:

This is a sample from a child reading about level DRA 18:

These are easy ways to incorporate differentiation into your poetry teaching and centers.  I love poetry and all it has to offer new readers!