Poetry notebooks

We had a class meeting today to come up with some solutions to help each other remember our poetry notebooks. Unfortunately we have not had 100% of the students bring their notebooks back signed on any Thursday this year. It is amazing to hear what the students came up with as ways to help themselves get on top of this responsibility. They chose to have everybody put their FROG folder inside of their poetry, and keep it there until Thursday morning. They also each took home a pink sticky note to put a reminder somewhere at home to complete this task. We are hoping tomorrow will be the first day we all come prepared! Thank you for helping them out with this responsibility.

The poem sent home today is "Suzy Snowflake." We listened to the old song in class, and the students wanted to be able to share it with you as well at home. Here is the link to hear the song:
http://susie1114.com/Christmas/Suzysnowflake.html
You will notice that many of poems this time of year are songs. Today in class we discussed some reasons for this. Since fluency is one of the goals for the poetry notebooks, singing them can help us gain smooth reading when the melody is taken away. It is also easier for students to hear a song and commit the words to memory- then when they read the words on a page, their memory easily matches the words they see.