Using Poetry for Fluency

As I mentioned before, I attended a really good training on fluency last week presented by Dr. Tim Rasinsky. We implemented one of his ideas for incorporating more poetry to help the kids learn prosody. I have taught my kids strategies for fluency, talked to their parents about how it will help them immensely with comprehension if they don't sound.like.a.robot.when.they.read! But some of them still read that way.
Now, I used to use poetry daily with my kids. Every week, we had a new poem in our pocket chart and we'd read it together in the morning whole group-but I got lazy and we don't do it nearly as often now.

 We studied Langston Hughes this past week. He has long and short, challenging and kind of silly poems, so it worked out really well for all my different ability levels. I assigned a poem to each student and their partner on Monday. They read it for me during small group instruction. During the week they read it together in workstation time and on Thursday I had them read it to me again individually. All the while we were working on some of them as a group, discussing the meaning and vocab. I think it worked out really well. It's something that we will continue doing each week for the rest of the year. Emily Dickinson is up next. :)