>  Character Education Lesson Plan Bank

Persevering Poetry

Overview

Children discuss and focus on perseverance. Taking a few minutes each day to memorize lines of a poem, they eventually see their efforts pay off as they learn to recite the entire poem.

Materials

• Poem appropriate to the children’s developmental level

Procedure

1. Define perseverance. Say: Perseverance is sticking to a task even when it's difficult. It's pushing to reach the finish when it would be much easier to give up. When you try to be the best person you can be, especially when it's difficult, you are showing perseverance.
   
2. Ask students to share examples of perseverance. Discuss these and why perseverance is important.
   
3. Explain that to model perseverance, they're going to memorize one line of a poem each day until they've memorized the whole poem.
   
4. Read the title and first line of the poem. Have them repeat the line back to you. If necessary, explain to them what each line means. Then read the line again and have them commit it to memory. Before they leave, ask them to recite the line one last time.
   
5. Each day have them learn a new line. Once they've memorized the whole poem, have them recite it together in front of another class.

Inspired by an idea in Lesson Plans for Character Education by Sharon Fincham, et al. (Manhattan, KS: The MASTER Teacher, Inc, 1998).

This lesson is from the Good Ideas book, available for purchase from the CHARACTER COUNTS! online store: http://www.charactercounts.org/materials

Language Arts 

Standard 5. Uses the general skills and strategies of the reading process.

Level II, Benchmark 8. Monitors own reading strategies and makes modifications as needed (e.g., recognizes when he or she is confused by a section of text, questions whether the text makes sense).

http://www.mcrel.org/standards-benchmarks/