Teaching Poetry and Quick Wins for Reading and Writing
It’s spring. Time for spring break, testing season, and the turn towards the closing of the year.
Many educators study their curriculum at this time of the year asking, “What next? What can I teach next that will be engaging for both me, the teacher, and for students?”
In full transparency, there are MANY things that I could imagine that would merit a ‘rite of passage’ spring study, but for this particular post, why not poetry?
After all, April is National Poetry Month.
Paging through the common core standards? Looking for poetry? Hmm…it is a bit interesting how the language has been written.
The reading standards toss the whole kitchen sink into the reading literature (RL) standard 10, “By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poetry…” you can see a bit more in the sample below (RL 3.10) pulled from the third grade standards.
Poetry doesn’t show up in the writing standards other than as an example of what students should be able to compare and contrast in their informational writing (along with stories).
Even though the standards aren’t spelling it out for us, in my opinion, there are many good reasons to teach poetry.
Range of Reading and Level of Text Complexity:
By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas, and poetry, at the high end of the grades 2-3 text complexity band independently and proficiently.
Teaching poetry helps build incredible skill sets that support other areas of independence that educators value, like creating habits that foster readers and writers.
Let’s look at a few reasons to teach poetry and some quick wins for creating a cycle of study around poetry, starting with thinking through skill sets we’re developing year-round that we can also develop during a study on poetry.
Quick Wins for Reading
Volume, Stamina, and Productivity
At the beginning of the year and throughout, I often talk to students about goal setting.
A few of the goals we discuss are….
✅ Volume - How many pages you can read or write
✅ Stamina - The duration of time you can do something without stopping
✅ Productivity - Getting things done
In a study such as poetry, these goals can be rehearsed and applied in both a reading study and a writing study.
For example, since poems are typically short texts that we can read quickly, we can read them at a high volume, which eventually increases stamina for reading for longer periods. When compounded, this leads to being able to read more complex texts. As for productivity, again, because poems are shorter texts, kids experience a sense of accomplishment after reading the poems.
During typical reading curriculum study cycles, students read chapter books, novels, or articles that take longer to complete. Compare that to poetry, where student readers often finish reading several poems in one independent reading block.
Poems are accessible to kids. They can complete many of them in one sitting, and we’re all familiar with that satisfying feeling when you check something off your to-do list. That sense of completion is important in developing the executive function system in our brains.
Performance & Reading with Fluency Work
Poetry helps students navigate the way we use the intonation of our voice to convey meaning (prosody), which is a really important skill set that will carry over into understanding the fiction books you read in the classroom.
So, something I highly recommend in this study is teaching and developing the skill set of performance strategies. Most poems are written to be performed, like spoken word, or in poetry slams. There’s an opportunity here to show kids videos of poets performing, and use them as part of your study.
My friend Antonio Sacre is a wonderful storyteller, and here are a few of his techniques:
🎭 Change your voice. Even if it's just an octave higher, an octave lower, and your normal tone. Voila! You’ve got three character voices.
🎭 Add a gesture. This includes facial expressions, especially your eyes so that students can see emotions even when wearing masks.
🎭 Alternate your volume. Vary from a whisper to shout and watch students lean in and wonder with you!
🎭 Add a dramatic pause. Add a lingering pause to build tension in the scene of a plot or to pause and think when an alternative point of view in a nonfiction text is offered.
🎭 Vary the pace. Read slowly or quickly based on each scene of the plot!
Quick Wins for Writing
Free-Verse Poetry & Student Identity
When designing a study of teaching writing of poetry, I often recommend teaching free-verse poetry. Poetry styles like haiku, limericks, or even rhymes are hard to write well (study them as readers, but perhaps stick to free verse as writers).
Much of the writing process throughout the entire school year is centered around structure, whether it’s the structure of a narrative, or an informational text (such as an essay). Sometimes, having a little bit of flexibility and freedom away from that structure is a gift to students who feel locked in by it or have exhausted their mental capacity in understanding it across the school year.
When designing a curriculum to teach writing, it’s often helpful to begin by thinking about the end. We typically ask, “What are students going to publish as a result of this study?”
Because poems tend to be short, rather than publishing one single poem, perhaps this study is designed so that students publish a collection or an anthology around student identity, like a “who am I” collection of poems.
Poetry—like all writing—is personal. When I discuss poetry with teachers, we often link it back to all the identity work we've been doing throughout the year. I wrote a blog on Social & Emotional Learning here so you can dive deeper into the subject and see how it can connect back to creating a study unit around poetry.
For example, students could write an anthology connected to their identity: who the student is as a person, a reader, a writer. It could be a collection of poems around a subject. For example, if a student is really into ocean animals, they could write a collection of poetry about ocean animals.
Whatever the theme is, creating an anthology maintains the volume and stamina student writers have been developing all year, along with a lens of rhythm and meaning poets use to create the words that best represent their ideas.
Word Selection
Teaching things like craft and word choice are really important techniques in any type of writing, and a study on poetry offers kids some skillsets and opportunities to practice writing with detail and elaboration in short-form, free-verse poems.
For example, when we study mentor texts and the moves of mentor authors, we often look at their word choice as a deliberate technique and craft connected to their style of writing. Poets are very deliberate in the words they choose to convey the desired meaning in poems.
Think about helping kids understand the power of words in this study. For example, you can model asking, “Do I really want to say happy or do I want to say ecstatic? Do I really want to say mad or livid?” Model for students your process for thinking through and selecting words that will help convey the meaning of your poems.
One fun exercise to use for this is an exercise we call “Shades of Meaning”. Take paint chips in various color shades, and write down words with varying degrees of intensity.
Since poets really think about the words they use, this could make for a cool study of words:
🌟 Vivid Verbs
🌟 Precise Nouns
🌟 Descriptive Adjectives
If you’ve prioritized social and emotional learning (SEL) this year, you are most likely tucking in ways to teach emotional intelligence.
Poetry is an excellent opportunity for students to apply their awareness and learn about all the normal feelings we experience in our everyday lives.
Perhaps you co-author selfie emoticon poems or books like the one pictured here. You can get these frames for free here on our resource page!
Play with Shapes and Formatting
When practicing the writing of poems, encourage students to use the space on the page to find clever ways to shape poems and play around with line breaks and white space.
Ask students to notice how it impacts their eye, the poem's meaning, and also how they read it.
Where to Start
If you need a place to start, take a look at this Poetry Walk video I made, which shows you how to create poems out of everyday life. There are also some free notice cards you can download and use with students!
I also wrote this blog post on A Few Of My Favorite Resources for Teaching Poetry for poetry books and professional resources that I recommend!
The most important tip of all… have fun! When you’re having fun, students will have fun too!
Invite colleagues to think with you. Perhaps you can design a school-wide poetry celebration or reach out to local businesses that might display student-written poems for the entire community to share.
Let me know how it goes. I can’t wait to hear all about it!
