SMART Board Poetry: Second Grade Lessons

SMART Board Poetry: Second Grade Lessons
Page content

Discussing poems in second grade is always an effective way to hone the decoding and fluency skills of your students. At this age, the students are perfecting their once trial-and-error reading and are starting to pay more attention to how sentences sound alike, making poems an excellent choice of reading materials for them. Here are ways by which you can use your SMART board for poetry during second grade lessons.

Sample Poem for Second Grade

Let’s use a sample poem by Smith as the content of these smart board activities. You can always apply the strategies to be presented here to any poem using the sequence template that you will be reading later on. Click on this link to download the sample poem, Laughing Time by William Jay Smith.

Pre-Reading

Ask the entire class if they love to laugh, and who among them loves laughing a lot. Encourage a show of hands. Afterwards, ask them what the difference between smiling and laughing is by drawing a smiling and a laughing mouth. Here, you may call on some volunteers to doodle on the SMART board their versions of smiling and laughing mouths. Use different colors for each student, and have them highlight which of their two drawings (smiling or laughing) they like more.

Then, move on to ask what, for them, does a giggling mouth, a snickering mouth, and a chortling mouth look like. Encourage some volunteers to draw their answers on the SMART board for everyone to see.

Once that is complete, ask the students to transition to the poem that you will be reading for the day. Tell the class that the poem is about laughing and how laughing is contagious.

During Reading

Project the poem on the SMART board for everyone. Read the poem yourself to model how they should read the piece. Have the students repeat every line after you. Finally, encourage them to read the entire poem on their own. While reading, tell the class to look out for the word in the poem that means the same or almost the same as laugh or laughing.

Post-Reading

After reading, have an informal survey of who liked and didn’t like the poem. Ask them what parts they liked and why they liked those parts. Afterwards, proceed to what parts they didn’t particularly like and why they didn’t like those parts. As you are listening to the answers of the class, simultaneously highlight the parts that they liked with a yellow marker, and underline the not-so-appealing parts.

Proceed to your mini-challenge–finding the word that means exactly or almost the same as laugh (Answer - guffaw). Make it sound like it is indeed a challenge for them, and once you find a winner, praise him/her heartily. Request that student to come to encircle guffaw using the smart board marker.

Have everyone copy the poem, and tell the students to encircle the word guffaw in their notes_._

To end the session, have everyone stand and read the poem with emotions. Then, post a challenge for them to say “Good-bye and thank you, teacher” by guffawing while saying their good-bye line.

Designing SMART board poetry second grade lessons should not be limited to projecting the poem to the class and doing all the work with the SMART board. Make the poetry session a meaningful activity for them by making them participate in “tinkering” with the poem using the SMART board.

You can also have your students participate in three other reading readiness games.