S is for Snowman!

This year, we have worked on incorporating more poetry into our classroom. Poetry is a great way to help your students build oral language, develop a sense of rhyming words, concepts of print as well as practice fluency and comprehension strategies. Plus, poetry is really fun!

 

We started our first poetry unit this month with this adorable poem, S is for Snowman.

 

We found this poem online {not sure where it’s from} and I retyped it and added cute clip art ‘cuz that’s how I roll 😉 My teaching partner got it printed to poster size and colored it for us. We decided to work on one poem a month so we could fit it in to our already jam-packed day. The first week in December, we introduced the poem and practiced it several times. My students came up with arm motions to help visualize the poem and we had it memorized in about 5 minutes 😉

 

The second week, I gave each student a printed copy of the poem and we talked about all the -at words in the poem. The teaching gods aligned this one perfectly as we just started working on -at family words. We found and highlighted the at words with yellow crayon, then practiced writing them on the back. We talked about how the word family words helped the poem to rhyme.

 

My students loved going on word hunts and did a fabulous job with this activity!

 

To culminate our poem for the month, we made this cute little snowman craft. After inferring what it meant for our snowman to be flat, we talked about ways to keep our snowman from melting. I loved their ideas and creative writing!  {I actually wrote their ideas on the board for them to copy because we didn’t have enough time to complete the writing and craft at once. I almost always try to get my kids to write on their own and sound out their words as they write, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do ;)}

 Then we put our snowman together and had him “peeking” over the writing. We do tons of crafts in kindergarten and they never seem to get enough of them! I just love how they turn out and they are awesome at helping us build our fine motor muscles!

Aren’t they the cutest?!