Classrooms Full of Poetry
by Katie W. Ray and Lester L. Laminack
(Originally published in CBC Features, Vol. 52, No. 1, Spring 1999.)
Responsible for a curriculum growing more crowded with content, teachers often feel forced
to "add a little more on" rather than giving students the slow time to make meaning from their learning. Poetry, carefully positioned alongside the social studies and science curriculum, can add depth and meaning. Whether teaching the horrors of war, the beauty of nature, or the despair of prejudice, poems capture the experiences of people's real lives and add feeling and emotion to our lessons.
So why poetry? Because of its condensed nature, poetry is uniquely well suited to complementing content area curriculum. While a novel of historical fiction can add as much depth to curriculum as a collection of poetry, reading and interacting around a novel requires a much larger investment of time. A poem is immediate and urgent, and as teachers feel the pressure to fit a lot into limited classroom hours, they can look to poetry to bring important, powerful meanings into their classrooms with this immediacy.
Another advantage to making poetry an integral part of content area studies is its accessibility to the wide range of reading abilities encountered in classrooms. Poems are often read aloud by the teacher, which allows students to focus all their attention on making meaning from the poem. A collection of poems that deals with a content area topic allows students to explore a wide range of the meanings and feelings related to that topic.
To study the content of our world, place our lives in it, and position ourselves alongside the content, we might consider the following possibilities for poetry across the day and throughout the week. The following ideas and suggestions for making poetry a powerful part of the curriculum are gleaned from observations of and interaction with classroom teachers who find joy and power in using poetry in the classroom.
A good starting point: immerse yourself and your students in the genre. You might begin by checking out the anthologies of poetry, collections of poetry by a single author, and individual poems in your school library and setting aside a poetry moment each morning during which you read aloud one of your favorite poems. This will help your students become familiar with the sounds of poetry. It also enables you to demonstrate the range of topics that poetry can address. The children can begin making charts and posters of favorite poems to be posted in the room.
Ask each child to select a favorite poem, illustrate it, and hang it in the classroom for others to read. This can easily lead to a classroom collection of favorites which could expand to include original poetry written by children and poems written by you.
Children can use themes from the science or social studies curriculum (mammals, seasons, families, state history) to make individual or class anthologies. Poems could be arranged to reflect various aspects of the curriculum. For example, an anthology on mammals could identify the characteristics of mammals and show the variety of animals classified as mammals. An anthology on state history might be organized chronologically to depict events during a particular window of time.
As children become more familiar with poetry they might work in groups to select a poem and develop a choral reading of it for the poetry moment each morning. These could be free choice selections or selections made within the parameters of a theme or topic of inquiry in the room. This activity could develop into having poetry transitions throughout the day (to begin the day, to go to lunch, to end they day) when different children are responsible for sharing a poem.
Younger children might enjoy creating hand and body motions for a favorite poem which could involve skills with listening, movement and the coordination of action and language. Another creative activity is to create a melody so that a favorite poem could be sung, chanted in rhythm, or done as a rap.
In the content areas, students can search for poems that introduce or extend topics of study. These could be collected and compiled by topic. In groups the children could choose a favorite one to divide into sections, illustrate and create a picture book. These books could be read aloud and become part of the classroom collection.
Children could work in small groups to adapt a poem as a play and then perform it for everyone else. You could also have them search for poems that describe how they feel that day, or have the small groups in search of poems that describe a range of feelings (group 1-angry, group 2-happy, group 3-anxious, etc.).
You could play music in the background while children search through anthologies, books of poetry by single authors, single poems to find poems that fit the music. (This is also great using works of art.) In small groups the children could select a poem or several poems and depict a scene, time period, mood, or event they evoke. These could be paired with music selected by the children and displayed along with art or photos to add dimension. A wall in the classroom, or the classroom door, could become a mural of great lines from poems in the room.
You might find it interesting to have children gather in groups of 6-10 and give each group a poem. Each child would then select a favorite line from their poem. Then ask each group to read their favorite line aloud, creating a new poem. After hearing these read once through ask the groups to spend a few minutes planning and have them create an order for the selected lines to be read. Some lines may become a refrain. Some lines may be read by one voice, some by two voices, some by all in the group. Invite them to rehearse in several different ways and then have each group present the new poems.
Following the previous example, children might enjoy rewriting a favorite story as a poem. They could start with just their knowledge of the story and retell it as a poem. Or they might select favorite phrases and lines in the story to build a poem.
As poetry starts flowing through the curriculum you might start "poetry partners" and have students in your class work in teams to share poetry with younger children in other classes. You might also bring attention to the power of poetry by inviting people in the school (principal, secretary, nurse, cafeteria staff, etc.) to come share a favorite poem and listen to the children perform a favorite of their own.
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To heighten awareness of poetry as part of your writing curriculum you might also begin reading poems like a writer. To do this you and your students might try some of the following suggestions.
Select a favorite poem and look closely at the "white space" and see how it shapes a poem. Talk about why the author might choose this particular arrangement. Have the children study their collections of poetry with attention to interesting or unusual uses of "white space."
You may also have them examine the way lines are started and ended. For example, do they all start with a capital letter? Does every line end with a rhyme? Are the lengths of the lines the same or very different? Can a thought be continued on the next line? After some examination, you and the children might make a list of possibilities for line construction and the use of capitals and punctuation. Make sure that children understand that each line in a poem is a unit of meaning.
Following a study of lines you may want to look at stanzas in poetry. You might reexamine the same poems and help the children discover what they can about stanzas, such as some that have uniform numbers of lines, some that divide the poem into different images, etc. You might type out the text of a poem in prose fashion and let the children try their hand at dividing it into lines, stanzas, and white space.
You might also look closely at the punctuation in poems. Do you find periods? commas? exclamation marks? quotations? In this examination, see what your children can discover about the uses of punctuation in poetry.
You can help children discover different types of poetry by showing them that some poems tell stories, some are brief and powerful images, some are list poems, etc. Once you've shown examples of the types have children look for and categorize (in their own ways) poems by type. Following this exploration you might also look at the variety of topics addressed through poetry. It might be fun to make a list of all the topics of poems they can find in a given time period, say fifteen minutes.
There is tremendous potential for poetry across your curriculum and throughout your year. We hope these suggestions help you begin to realize some of that potential with your students. •
Katie W. Ray began her career as a language arts teacher in the public schools of South Carolina where she taught reading and writing. In 1992, Katie traveled to New York City to join the staff of The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University. As a member of this staff, Katie was a teacher of teachers in classrooms all over New York City. Through demonstration teaching and study groups, Katie supported the teaching of writing at all grade levels, K-6. In 1994, Katie joined the faculty at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, where she was an Associate Professor. She was been awarded two prestigious teaching awards during this time: the Taft Botner Award in 1996 and the Chancellor's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1998. Katie left WCU in December of 2002 to pursue full time writing, research and consulting.
Katie is the author or co-author of five books on the teaching of writing:
Spelling in Use: Looking Closely at Spelling in Whole Language Classrooms; Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom; The Writing Workshop: Working Through the Hard Parts (And They're All Hard Parts); What You Know By Heart: Developing Curriculum for your Writing Workshop; and About the Authors: Writing Workshop With Our Youngest Writers. She has also published numerous articles and book chapters, and is a former co-editor of the NCTE journal Primary Voices K-6.
Lester L. Laminack is professor in the department of Birth-Kindergarten, Elementary and Middle Grades Education, at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in literacy education. Lester is an active member of the National Council of Teachers of English and served as co-editor of the NCTE journal Primary Voices. He also served as a teaching editor for the magazine Teaching K-8, and wrote the Parent Connection column (2000-2002). He has recently been named editor of the Children's Book Review Department of the NCTE journal Language Arts (2003-2006). He is a former member of the Whole Language Umbrella Governing Board, a former member of the Governing Board and Secretary of the North Carolina Association for the Education of Young Children, and a former member of the Board of Directors for the Center for the Expansion of Language and Thinking. He served as the Basic Reading Consultant to Literacy Volunteers of America from 1987 through 2001.
His academic publications include six books, including Learning With Zachary, Spelling In Use, Volunteers Working With Young Readers, and his contributions to The Writing Workshop: Working Through the Hard Parts (And They're All Hard Parts); and several articles published in journals such as The Reading Teacher, Science and Children, Language Arts, Primary Voices, and Young Children. In addition, Lester is the author of The Sunsets of Miss Olivia Wiggins, Trevor's Wiggly-Wobbly Tooth, and Saturdays and Tea Cakes, as well as the forthcoming title Jake's 100th Day of School. All of his children's books are published by Peachtree Publishers, Ltd.