Teaching poetry writing is one of the (many) great loves of my life! Upper elementary students can enjoy poetry writing if it is taught to them systematically.
On today’s episode, I start with the first three steps I use for teaching poetry to fourth graders and up:
- Plan for poetry teaching to be a process—not a one and done event.
- I like to use two weeks of writing time each semester for poetry writing in order to introduce it in a fun way and teach all the skills they will need in order to succeed at writing poetry.
- Read aloud from poetry during reading, content areas, unit studies, etc.
- Use fun, whimsical, silly, and enjoyable poetry books for read aloud.
- Use familiar yet simple verses for them to highlight and code the rhyme scheme and syllabication with you. (Give them copies of the ones you will teach rhyme scheme from.)
- Teach the two parts of rhyme scheme using highlighters to code the rhyming words at the end of the lines.
- Highlight rhyming words.
- Teach them to label these with their letters (AA, etc).
- Teach them to count and write syllables after each line.
I go over this using “Humpty Dumpty” as an example, so it is easy to follow my methodology.
Join me next week for the remaining six steps!
