Busy Learning! Check Out Our Poetry Center

I am officially impressed with all of these Kindergarten bloggers. By the time I get home from work, I am exhausted! And the last thing I want to do is keep working! We're still here and still doing really great and exciting things in Kindergarten. It's so hard to find the time to get through everything that we need to do in a day, but we usually squeeze it all in. We even manage to have some fun sometimes (who am I kidding? Every minute is fun with 5 year olds!).

Our guided reading/center time is everyone's favorite time of the day! In my opinion, this is one of the most important times of our school day. I'm working with my students on their level in guided reading and they are practicing the skills that we've been working on independently in their centers.

My center rotation schedule looks SUPER complicated, but it makes perfect sense to me. My mentor teacher (who is super amazing, by the way) has been phenomenal at working with me on my center schedule. At this point, each student goes to 4 centers each day. One center is their guided reading with me, one center is seat work (which is easily differentiated), and the other two are instructional centers. I have a chart that looks like this for every day of the week. My excel spreadsheet for centers is sort of out of control ;)

Throughout the week, they rotate through 10 instructional centers. Our centers are poetry, word work, phonemic awareness, pocket chart, writing, math, Roll, Say, Keep, library, big books, and our listening center. Several of our centers (poetry, library, big books, writing, and Roll, Say, Keep) require zero prep time. We've already set up the procedures and expectations for each of these centers, so I don't have to get anything ready for them. They stay pretty much the same from week to week. Every few weeks, I make some new cards for Roll, Say, Keep, but that's it! I'll be back later this week to show you what we use for each of our centers, but today we're just going to take a peek at our poetry center. It's one of our newest centers to implement, but they are doing such a great job!

Poetry: I use Karen Jones' A to Z Poetry Notebooks. I am obsessed with it!

Check it out on TPT

I use the poem that goes along with our letter of the week for phonics. Last week, our focus letter was "S", so we used the S poem. I wrote out the poem on sentence strips and stuck it in the pocket chart to use as a warm up for shared reading each day.

My poetry center doesn't start until Wednesday so my students are familiar with the poem by the time they work in their notebooks. On Wednesday morning, we read the poem out of my poetry notebook and I walk them through all of the steps for the poetry center for that week. We've been doing this center for a few weeks, so they've pretty much gotten the hang of it. They work in groups of 2-3 for centers, so they know to ask each other if they need help and to not bother Miss Vick while I'm working with other groups!!

These are a few of their completed "M" pages from a few weeks ago. They blow me away with how quickly they catch on!

 This sweet one forgot to circle her sight words, but she did check the box! One step at a time ;)

We're still a little bit confused about how sometimes our sight words are part of another word, but that means it's NOT our sight word. Notice how this student circled "on" in the word "monkeys". It's hard!

So that's how our poetry center rolls these days. They are doing a great job with it and I love that it's independent and that it follows the same format each week. I'll be back later this week with another peek at more of our centers. I have a lot to do today...like take a nap and go to Target. I love having the whole week off for Thanksgiving! 

Happy Monday!