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Teacher Notes (not visible to students)

Poetry has melody, rhythm, pacing, and pitch that support building fluency skills, especially prosody (expression, automaticity, and comprehension). Building fluency with poetry inspires and delights not only struggling readers but all readers. Using poetry for struggling readers is an authentic magical genre that supports their fluency development. Fluency is the bridge between word learning, decoding, and comprehension (Pikulski & Chard, 2005). Using poetry is an excellent pathway to scaffold text with explicit instruction, modeling of automaticity (rate and accuracy), and prosody (expression). Students receive guided practice and teacher and student feedback. Students engage in purposeful rereadings and discussions while sometimes closely analyzing and annotating the poems. You can challenge your students with new and wonderful vocabulary and more complex poems. And reading poetry is fun! -Laura Hancock, Literacy Junkie Assign this activity multiple times to practice fluency. Then have students complete a reflection activity to compare and contrast their first reading with their final reading. They will be amazed and proud of their progress! Pikulski, J. J., & Chard, D. J. (2005). Fluency: Bridge between decoding and reading comprehension. The Reading Teacher, 58(6), 510–519. https://doi.org/10.1598/rt.58.6.2