MLK, Jr. Poetry FREEBIE!

Hey there! It's Nicole from Teaching With Style!

I just LOVE using poetry in the classroom! 

Each year, I make poetry books for my students and we add to them each week.  {Check out this post to see how I make them and a freebie!}  Poetry is an awesome low-pressure way for students to gain familiarity with using academic language.  

The poems that we add to our books always have little blank boxes at the bottom.  So do all the poems I make for my products I sell on TpT.  Why, you ask? It's a GLAD strategy that works so amazingly well for ELL students! When they sketch or write in the box, it helps them process and remember the vocabulary and content.  

Today, I made you a poem freebie about Martin Luther King, Jr.  I used to use this poem with my first grade team when I taught back in Oregon.  Here is our routine for teaching weekly poems:

• Write the poem on chart paper and introduce whole group, on the carpet.  
• First, read the poem in entirety to the students.
• Then, have the students echo you, line-by-line.
• Then, practice reading the poem altogether and in pairs.
• Write the poem on two sets of sentence strips for a pocket chart center.  Cut up one set of the sentence strips word-by-word.  The students practice reading the poem, then they match the words to the full poem in the pocket chart.
• Last, pass out the paper version of the poem.  Have students sketch what they learned and highlight important words in the poem.  Glue the poems in their poetry books.  

Are you ready to try this out? Grab this poem and get started! 

Click either picture above to download from my Google Drive!

Happy reading! :)