Teaching Poetry to children
Poetry can be difficult for students in the younger elementary grades. Heck, it can still be difficult for University students to understand! I believe the key to introducing poetry into your classroom is to allow for students' personal (and reasonable) interpretations and most of all, to have fun writing and reading poetry!
Theme Poetry: ReadWriteThink International Reading Association provides dynamic online interactive resources to support a variety of lessons. I particularly like their tool on Theme Poetry. They explain their online too as: "...elementary students can write poems based on shapes from five different categories: Nature, School, Sports, Celebrations, and Shapes. Within these categories, 32 different shapes are included.
By selecting a shape, students are learning how to focus their writing on a particular topic or theme. In addition, as part of the online tool, students are prompted to brainstorm, write, and revise their poems, thus reinforcing elements of the writing process. Students can save their draft poems to revise later...The finished theme poems can also be printed and colored to display in the classroom or at home" (ReadWriteThink, 2014).
As a beginning teacher, I could see Theme Poem instruction being used in all elementary grades. It allows children to engage the artistic part of their brain as well as the areas used for composition of written text. I would be excited to see what my students could come up with and how they would relate their poems to the shape they wrote them in. Theme poetry gives students the knowledge and wisdom to look at a piece of text in all it's aspects. This is useful because in advanced texts, often the format is done in a purposeful way. Theme poetry is a fun, engaging way to introduce young students to these abstract concepts.
Theme Poetry: ReadWriteThink International Reading Association provides dynamic online interactive resources to support a variety of lessons. I particularly like their tool on Theme Poetry. They explain their online too as: "...elementary students can write poems based on shapes from five different categories: Nature, School, Sports, Celebrations, and Shapes. Within these categories, 32 different shapes are included.
By selecting a shape, students are learning how to focus their writing on a particular topic or theme. In addition, as part of the online tool, students are prompted to brainstorm, write, and revise their poems, thus reinforcing elements of the writing process. Students can save their draft poems to revise later...The finished theme poems can also be printed and colored to display in the classroom or at home" (ReadWriteThink, 2014).
As a beginning teacher, I could see Theme Poem instruction being used in all elementary grades. It allows children to engage the artistic part of their brain as well as the areas used for composition of written text. I would be excited to see what my students could come up with and how they would relate their poems to the shape they wrote them in. Theme poetry gives students the knowledge and wisdom to look at a piece of text in all it's aspects. This is useful because in advanced texts, often the format is done in a purposeful way. Theme poetry is a fun, engaging way to introduce young students to these abstract concepts.
REFERENCES
ReadWriteThink Internation Reading Association. (2014). Theme Poems. Retrieved from: http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/student-interactives/theme-poems-30044.html