Purposeful Poetry Can Help Prevent Reading Difficulties 

April is National Poetry Month -- but please don’t relegate poems to only one month! Rather, use them all year long to get kids excited about language and to build foundational literacy skills.   Poems can be used to teach fluency, vocabulary, phonic patterns, text structure, speaking and listening, author study, and comprehension. Most children find poems engaging and enjoy reading, writing, and presenting them. Perhaps this is due to the brevity, rhythms, and rhymes of poems, as