The Missouri Reader
• Is YOUR teacher magazine
• Is a peer reviewed professional journal
• Has been publishing for over 40 years
• Has articles on the latest literacy issues
Want to submit an article? See the last page for details about submissions. We especially welcome joint articles by teachers & professors collaborating on literacy projects. We try publish articles that will help teachers with their everyday teaching. We want to help you become that teacher we all wish we had had when we were in school.
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In 1996, the Academy of American Poets established National Poetry Month and chose April as an ideal month to hold it. According to their literature, it has become “…the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K-12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, bloggers, and poets marking poetry’s important place in our culture and our lives.”
National Poetry Month is a catalyst for many teachers to show their kids that millions of adults across the country are also celebrating poetry. This leads to the need for ways for students to celebrate. How do we raise the level of interest in poetry in schools? Make it more exciting? More accessible? More acceptable? I asked friends in education and writing to share suggestions and was delighted to receive responses from classroom teachers, school librarians, public librarians, university professors, and poets from 13 states across the country. It has been my happy opportunity to organize the results and pass them along to you. Some of the activities offer ideas for reading and performing poetry while others focus more on writing poems. Some material is copyrighted so feel free to put it to work but please refrain from reproducing it without the author’s consent. Names and contact e-mail addresses are listed at the end of the article. And of course, I had a few ideas of my own to add!
Ideas About Reading and Celebrating Poems
Tim Rasinki
● I am a huge advocate for the use of poetry (and song) in the literacy classroom for all students, but especially for younger readers and older readers who struggle. I’d like to share reasons why I think poetry should be an essential part of any literacy program. Poetry expands children’s world and stretches their imaginations. Beyond its ability to tickle a funny bone or two, poetry can be deeply profound and help build students’ knowledge of the world they live in.
● Poetry is immensely suited to improve foundational reading competencies. Research tells us that many children struggle in reading because they are not fully proficient in the foundational aspects of reading.
● Poetry helps children develop an awareness of the phonemes. Poetry is filled with texts that play with sounds. Think of all the nursery rhymes children should learn before starting school. Diddle Diddle Dumpling, Dickery Dickery Dare, Peter Piper, Picked a Peck, or Betty Botter Bought Some Butter are sure to help children develop an awareness of the phonemes.
● One of the great benefits of poetry is that it lends itself to a good deal of social interaction and community building. Poems are meant to be performed, and that assumes an audience. The poet-audience connection is in itself a community activity. Also, poems can be broken into parts so that more than one reader is involved. Some poems, called partner poems, are actually designed to be read by two or more readers. Readers will have to interact with their partners as they coach and encourage one another to make the best poetry performance possible. Poetry helps students engage in positive social interaction and builds community.
● Poetry builds vocabulary. Poetry is filled with rich words that poets use to weave their magic. Our job as teachers is simply to help children notice these great words that poets make such great use of.
● Poetry develops reading fluency. Poetry is meant to be performed, so in order to get the point where students are able to perform, they need to rehearse, hopefully under the guidance and support of a teacher. Moreover, the aim of the repeated reading is to read with good expression (prosody), which is at the heart of fluency, instead of reading fast which is the goal of too many repeated reading lessons.
● Poetry can be joyous. So many of today’s children’s poets write with such great humor that children are certain to find great delight. Poetry is fun reading!
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By
David L. Harrison
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by
By David L. Harrison