Use poetry notebooks to accomplish your goals in your classroom.
This notebook is easy to print, bind and each student can have their own. It features one poem that reinforces a letter of the alphabet.

You could use these poetry notebooks as an extension of doing one poem a week whole class so these are familiar and could then be used as a literacy center activity. Sample directions could be to read with a pointer (practicing 1:1), highlighting the letter of the week and then illustrating the poem. 

Students will be able to do this quite independently, if they are using a poem they are familiar with - for example if you did the poem with the whole class the week before.

KindergartenWorks brings you a picture to go along with each poem to make it simple for all students to find the correct poem. Similarly, the poems at the beginning feature enhanced spacing to help students track print. You'll notice that at the beginning, the letters to highlight are traceable. This eases students into the concepts of writing in the target letter when fine motor skills are still in the works! Later poems allow students to grow into writing the letter themselves.
Large picture icon included for each poem to attach to your sentence strip copies of these poems to use during your shared reading experiences.

List of Included Poems:

• Mm- Do You Know the Muffin Man?
• Ss- Sing a Song of Sixpence
• Tt- Little Miss Muffett
• Dd- Hey Diddle Diddle
• Aa- Jack Be Nimble
• Ff- Five Fast Fishes
• Pp- Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater
• Jj- Jack and Jill
• Nn- Five Little Pumpkins
• Hh- Humpty Dumpty
• Bb- Baa Baa Black Sheep
• Ww- Twinkle Twinkle
• Ii- Itsy Bitsy Spider
• Ll- Mary Had a Little Lamb
• Rr- Row Row Row Your Boat
• Uu- Lou Lou Skip to my Lou
• Cc- Hot Cross Buns
• Kk- Hickory Dickory Dock
• Vv- Van's Violin
• Qq- Quentin's Duck
• Ee- Little Bo Peep
• Xx- Xavier Alien
• Yy- Yummy Yams
• Zz- Zippety Do Daah
• Plus 3 more classic poems - that's 29 total!

The reason this developed within my classroom was because I felt as though students needed to be exposed to nursery rhymes for numerous reasons! This was my way to fit it in and meet multiple standards. So, for example I use "Do you know the Muffin Man" when I reinforce the letter m, “Hickory Dickory Dock" to reinforce k. There are a few, less common letters which ended up needing a song instead of a poem, so we made it work. I give credit to a past R/LA series for those difficult poems.*

General standards that are met by this when used as described:

• Recite short poems, rhymes, and songs.
• Match oral words to printed words.
• Identify letters, words, and sentences.
• Read aloud smoothly and easily in familiar text.
• Draw pictures and write words for a specific reason.
• Follow words from left to right and from top to bottom on the printed page.
• Recognize that sentences in print are made up of separate words. 
• Distinguish letters from words.