Poetry Resource Guide for Teachers

Reading Poetry With Students

The best way to get students interested in writing poetry is rst to spend time reading poetry together and helping students become familiar with poetry as a way of expressing feelings and ideas.

1. Make the reading of poetry part of your classroom routine and try reading a different poem a day or the same poem every day for a week or two. Read your favorite poems or students’ favorite poems. Read poems about different subjects and celebrations. After hearing a variety of poems, students will begin to recognize what different kinds of poetry sound like and they will begin to understand what makes a poem a poem.

2. Invite students to talk freely about what they experienced during the poetry readings. You may guide students with questions such as these:

   • How did the poem(s) make you feel? What parts of the poem(s) made you feel that way?
   • How do you show what you are feeling or thinking about?
   • Discuss features of the poem(s)—repetition, rhythm, sound, rhyme (if it is a rhyming poem), imagery, humor, ambiguity, unusual words, unusual use of words, and so on.
   • What do you think makes a poem a poem?
   • How are poems different from stories?
   • Do you think poems are easier or harder to understand than stories? Why?

3. Invite students to look through poetry anthologies with you. Browse through several anthologies, holdingup various pages so students can see that poems vary in length and physical shape and contain poems by many different writers. Once students have started writing their own poems, they can create a class anthology, complete with illustrations and bound into book format.

Read on for the full Poetry Resource Guide for Teachers on Lee and Low Books.

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