Teaching Kids to Write Poetry

Why Poetry?
When I was a classroom teacher, geometry was different to teach than other parts of math. Most of the year was spent calculating and counting, and of course, there were some kids who just found math more difficult than others. But those kids who weren't as capable with "regular" math skills had their moment to shine when we got to geometry: they had the language to talk about shapes and the perception to understand lines and angles and all the visual-spatial details in geometry. When I started teaching my students to write poetry, I came to feel that poetry is to writing what geometry is to math. Many students who weren't as capable and confident in writing in general found their calling in writing poetry-- the great thing was, the capable writers often loved poetry as well.

While poetry is not narrative or informative or opinion writing (the three Common Core text types K-12 students must learn to write), it has aspects of all those. More adults than not are intimidated by poetry and most of us wouldn't pick up a book of poems for our next good read. But I found first graders laughed out loud or sat there with their mouths wide open, fascinated, when I read a great poem aloud, and it was so sweet to see them inspired to create a similar effect with words they themselves tried to put down in poetic form. Besides the sheer fun of spending time on poetry with kids, I hoped that maybe finding a love of poetry as a kid would help them be less intimidated by it in high school or college, more apt to look to poetry for solace or wisdom or beauty as an adult. Most importantly, I found that writing poetry is a great way to hone writing skills in general; poetry is a microcosm of good writing. In poetry, just like in all good writing, but even more so: every word counts so words should be chosen carefully, ending lines matter, there is a place for metaphor and a place for concrete details, pattern or rhythm can have a powerful effect, and punctuation is chosen with intention. Writing a poem forces kids to care more and think harder than they may have before about each word, each line, how it really sounds and the feeling it gives, and yet-- it is approachable for kids and feels easier because it's short and because they can write several poems in a single writing session. I love teaching kids to write poetry and now in the spring of this homeschool year I am in the midst of it with my son.

W always has had a bit of a knack for poetry. Somehow it was one type of writing that I had seen him do at home even before this homeschool year. I don't know what got him started. But for some time he's been known to write a poem to give to a family member as a gift. He's very observant in some ways so I think that gave him a good place to start with poetry.

Two poems I was given this year for my birthday, about a moment when we spotted a deer in the woods

Resources for Teaching Poetry

In short, you can teach poetry without being a poet yourself and without a lot of resources!

I don't have a research-based unit or a program or prewritten lessons to guide me in the teaching of poetry, as I have had for all the other types of writing we've done this year. I'm not a poet. I have a couple of books about teaching poetry that I refer to: Kids' Poems: Teaching Second Graders to Love Poetry by Regie Routman (I owned a first and second grade version of this great book that got me started on teaching poetry in the classroom, and it still has lots of great tips even though it is technically for younger students-- don't tell my son), and a chapter with some guidance on poetry teaching in my fourth grade writing workshop If...Then...Curriculum book. But these are just references; for poetry writing we've made our own path.

Alongside this poetry writing "unit" I have been reading several poems from various poets daily to both my kids just to make poetry a part of life. I generally read aloud something to both of them to start our days anyhow, so right now, poetry fits into that space. While I try to sample many poetic styles from different walks of life and different time periods on different topics, I make sure to highlight mostly free-verse (non rhyming) poetry. It seems that all kids, even older kids, when asked what they know about poetry, say simply: it rhymes. And while it's true that sometimes it does, the rhyming is not what makes poetry poetry. They need to grasp the more essential differences between prose and poetic language. Plus, when a kid works too hard to write in rhyme, the overall quality of the resulting poem can be a little lacking or contrived. So we focus on free-verse poetry.

I don't have many physical resources this spring. I had envisioned checking out dozens of poetry anthologies about now from our libraries, which we've relied on heavily this year, but that was not to be since they have been closed for the past two months. So for the actual poems we read each day and find inspiration in, we have accessed some poetry anthologies on Epic (free trial for 30 days!), and we have a handful of favorite poetry books around the house: Love that Dog by Sharon Creech, The Bill Martin Jr. Big Book of Poetry, If Not for the Cat by Jack Prelutsky (great haikus), and Falling Down the Page: A Book of List Poems edited by Georgia Heard. There are lots of poems free to read online too; poets.org has been a source we go to often, like recently when I wanted to find examples of Emily Dickinson poems to show W after we read a picture-book biography about her. I've also looked up song lyrics to read aloud to point out that they are in fact poems put to music.

  

Lessons/Prompts/Poems that Inspired Us
Some poems I can see my kids love when I read them, and with those I pause to ask what they notice, what they like about it. Just doing that draws out observations that can become things W tries later in his own writing. Many of the teaching points I might have taught come up naturally just by reading and enjoying and analyzing some published poetry. These are some of the "lesson" topics we've had, which mostly sprung from features we've identified in poems and then experimented with in our own writing. Sometimes I purposely pulled together a few poems that served as examples of how a particular feature could be used.

Lesson Topic Ideas

• Repetition
• Consider white space on the page and read poems aloud to hear the best place to put a line break
• Poems can take a particular shape having to do with the subject of the poem
• Personification
• Ending lines are important and tend to stand out
• Different voices a poem can be in: Who is saying this poem? Who is it spoken to? Is there more than one voice in this poem?
• Show, don't tell-- "red face, clenched hands" instead of "I was mad"
• Focus on small moments
• Observe closely
• Careful word choice matters
• Multiple poems on the same topic can have different tones or themes. We used lyrics from a couple different songs about love to notice this, as well as a couple different poems about dreams
• Go on an observation walk...

We went on an observation walk one day. It had been sort of a grumpy, moody morning and I'd noticed the sky had cleared and it looked gorgeous outside and we needed a change of pace. Late morning, instead of what I had had sketched out for poetry that day, I gave both my kids a clipboard, paper, and a writing implement. I told them: the goal is to walk around and observe. Look at things closely, notice everything you can with your senses-- what you smell, see, hear, feel. Find a place to sit for a bit, move when you want to. Try to notice little details outside and see what inspires you, and (to W) get started on a poem / (to M): draw what you see. It was a glorious spring morning so they couldn't help but get into it. W sat for a while in various spots, letting the poems he'd already written waft around next to him in the breeze. At one point he climbed a tree, climbed down, wrote a bit, then climbed up it again, telling me he was trying to write a poem about something from different perspectives. M, as she always does when I include her in her own way in big-kid work, owned the assignment whole-heartedly. She looked around, plunked herself under a tree, and drew "a bee getting nectar from a flower." Then she proceeded to also record on her paper W's boomerang she found abandoned in the grass and our fence gate. An exploration like this provides great inspiration for little naturalists, especially when the mood/weather calls for it.

W's haikus inspired by the brook

M's paper, which says, "The water goes fast"

There's a poet in this picture

Writing in the Style of Another Poet
One night at bed time W asked me a long line of rhetorical what-if questions and when I started to respond he said, "I know, I should write a poem about that." I had planned to someday soon show him Shel Silverstein's "Whatif" poem for a prompt, so the very next day, we tried that out and wrote our own question poems. I find real value in finding inspiration from specific poems and trying to write in the style of another poet-- borrowing a key phrase, or structure, or pattern, or rhythm, or voice and making it your own. Copying someone else's work is not okay but getting ideas from them and trying out their style or building from it is. Here are some specific poems that inspired us:

• "Where I'm From" by George Ella Lyon-- we read this poem, which has become an entire movement, and which I am pretty sure I had a college freshman writing assignment based on. We read the story behind it and several poems on the I am From Project web site. W wrote his own version which he thought long and hard about. It was neat to see the things, places, experiences that he thinks make him him at (almost) ten years old.

• "Dog" by Valerie Worth-- We noticed how it beautifully captures a tiny, specific moment of a dog lying under a tree so that the reader can picture it. We thought we'd try capturing a small, specific moment like this. And then W disappeared. I checked on him and realized he was writing-- on the floor in the corner of the living room sitting behind a chair-- so I let him be. Eventually after several long moments he reappeared, invigorated, saying things like, "That was so fun." He'd been "spying" on his sister in the next room, noticing and recording in poetic form her every move. He had so much fun he went back and did it again, writing a second poem featuring his sister, still on the couch, again as the subject. ...And while I sat at the table alone, I wrote one about our dog in the same vein, which I was rather proud of. A week or two later there was a kids' radio show on our local public radio station with a poetry theme. The host was inviting kids to call in with their own poems and I was happy that W chose one of the small moment poems he'd written about his sister to call in with. He was elated when they actually took his call (at about 47 minutes in). His 30 seconds of fame also went a bit toward solving one sticky point about homeschool learning-- finding an authentic audience for kids' written work. (We'll also make an anthology of his poems before the school year is over, but I have a feeling nothing will compare to being on air.) 

• "This is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams-- I could tell the moment I read this poem that it struck a chord with W. He could understand the idea of being sorry, but not sorry. Of how good those cold, sweet plums must have been. We found there was a picture book This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness that was itself a play on this one famous poem, and we enjoyed several of the poems in it. Being human, neither of us had any shortage of topics about which we were sorry-but-not-sorry about...

• "Things" by Eloise Greenfield-- Earlier this year, as part of something else entirely, I had shared this poem with W. He recalled it one day recently and liked it for its repetition, its childish voice, and its theme that some things are temporary while other last. He wrote his own poem on that theme, which I will indeed remember.

Poem inspired by the rhythm and repetition of Eloise Greenfield's "Things"

• "Whatif" by Shel Silverstein-- So many possibilities to consider in verse...

• "Things to do if you are the Sun" by Bobbi Katz and "Things to do if you are a Pencil" by Elaine Magliaro-- we played around with our own poems in this voice that speaks to an object, and focuses on the features that make a thing (or animal) what it is. 

• "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams-- W got a kick out of how simple and clear the snapshot of this famous poem was. We wrote our own "So much depends upon..." poems. 

Once when we were out on a walk W described the trembling movement of the branches of a tree in a light breeze using the metaphor of a nervous ballerina-- so I know poetry is seeping in.

As far as teaching writing goes, I feel a little like I am cheating, putting my feet up these last few weeks. After a year of hard work I am not planning nearly so much for our poetry study as I did for any other type of writing we've worked on. We're finding inspiration left and right, but our poetry writing unit feels more forgiving, more day to day, and doesn't require quite as much time to feel productive. It certainly comes a little easier to W as well-- though he scoots back and forth on his scooter almost every day as he brainstorms topics and choice of words and opening lines until he's ready to sit and write.

I've also scribed a couple of poems for M. And of course she participates in our observation walks. It's nice too that poetry is a form of writing that can work on multiple levels.

I've even gotten in on the fun, writing poems myself some days when inspiration strikes. I sort of can't resist. It is always great, cathartic fun to be creative in any way as an adult. When W was writing fiction stories or literary essays earlier this year, I just taught the lesson but didn't necessarily write my own. But we're all giving poetry a try almost daily right now.