by Cristian Eden

“I never knew my son was a poet!”, a parent enthusiastically exclaims. After reading a classroom assignment by her third grade son, this parent was in awe of how nicely her son used his writing skills to create a nature poem with great imagery. As I’ve observed as a teacher, without exposure to creative outlets, students’ hidden talents cannot be revealed.  My personal enjoyment of writing and reading poetry has led me to find new ways to incorporate the use of poetry in the classroom, and it has proven to be successful in many ways with my third graders. Furthermore, the students have found it enjoyable to be creative through language arts.

 When the idea of poetry is first announced to a class, many lower grade students immediately recall the works of Shel Silverstein, while others remember the poems of Dr. Seuss or Mother Goose. Limited exposure to a range of poetic works and writers leads students to a narrow idea of what is expected in their own writing. My first task is to expose students to various works of poems and poets. Third graders marvel in timeless poems like "April Rain Song", by Langston Hughes, and more contemporary works such as "What I Found in My Desk", by Bruce Lansky. They also enjoy hearing stories such as Love that Dog by Sharon Creech, a novel written in poetic form about a boy who finds inspiration in poetry.

As an introduction to poetry writing, I begin with a lesson about being unable to write poetry. Using Bruce Lansky’s web site: www.gigglepoetry.com, students are shown the simplicity of writing a poem through a lesson that allows students to create a poem with exaggerated excuses as to why they are unable to write poetry. The children enjoy making silly one line excuses such as ‘my head is about to explode’, and ‘the doctor said I shouldn’t use my brain for a week’. They compose these one line excuses to form a complete poem. Once they realize how painless and enjoyable poetry writing can be, they are ready to expand their writing to more complete poems.

 In addition to using poetry to develop creativity in students, poetry can also be used as a tool to teach and reinforce grammatical concepts. When reviewing the importance of adjectives and their relation to nouns, I began to ponder how I could assess the students’ understanding. I exposed the students to various forms of acrostic poems, which they thoroughly enjoyed. As an assessment of adjectives and nouns, students were asked to write an acrostic poem for our state (Georgia) and its many attributes. The requirement for this assessment was that each line of the poem had to include an adjective before a noun. One example by a student reads:

GEORGIA! By Kyle

Great restaurants
Enormous mountains
Outstanding cities
Remarkable schools
Glorious lakes
Incredible valleys
Awesome buildings

Through this assignment, not only did students demonstrate their comprehension of adjectives and nouns, but they also sought to use a vocabulary that was more expansive.  Rather than being described as ‘awesome’, mountains suddenly became ‘remarkable’ or ‘astonishing’. Other adjectives such as ‘rich’, ‘incredible’, and ‘exceptional’ were also utilized. A similar technique was applied when introducing verbs and adverbs with very good results.

In order to more successfully teach concepts of similes and metaphors, I devised a lesson that would familiarize the students with these concepts and challenge their understanding. The lesson was introduced with a reading of "Since Hannah Moved Away", a poem by Judith Viorst that incorporates similes and metaphors. After a lesson on both literary devices, students were instructed to write a poem on the topic ‘If I were a Super hero’. They were given the option to use either figure of speech. After creating their poems, students were invited to share their finished product with the class. Upon listening to each other’s works, students were able to recognize and differentiate the two literary devices. Constructive criticism was offered from the audience when it was unclear as to which literary device was being practiced. One student wrote:

If I Were a Superhero

If I were a superhero,
I would be the strongest girl alive
I would be brave enough to lift a beehive!
I would always give and share,
I could even change the color of people's hair!
I could fly like an eagle,
But as high as a beagle!

By Caroline

Once I began to explore how other forms of poetry could be joined with literary devices and grammar skills, our language arts lessons became entertaining. Haiku’s were joined with lessons on counting syllables, while rhyming schemes were linked to spelling word lists. It then became important to allow the students some freedom from the traditional poetic forms. This allowed for further originality in their writing.  The next step in the process was to move the use of their newly acquired understanding of grammar skills from poetry to prose. At first, students were willing to take small risks by including adjectives and poetic imagery in simple sentences. Once they were successful with this inclusion, they took more risks by adding similes and metaphors when appropriate. When writing a summary about a story read In class, one student included a sentence that described one of the characters "as smart as Einstein". This same student took much delight in another story we read Brave as a Mountain Lion, by Anne Herbert Scott. This book, with its many metaphors, gave the students many great ideas to incorporate in their prose. The sense of pride the students took in their work was obvious, as they were eager to share their work with their peers.

Though some students embraced these lessons more willingly than others, I found that overall the learning goals were attained with greater success than with a more traditional approach.  I attribute some of the feats to the idea that students are always willing to learn in new ways. As a teacher, it was gratifying to learn that another way of differentiating the instruction led to a discovery of a multiple intelligence that many students many have never realized. Furthermore, the students’ self-confidence in their writing soared. They were able to gain a new perspective on writing. After a writing activity, one student commented to his peers that "writing poetry is better than doing all those multiplication problems".

With all the effort that students poured into their writing, I decided to extend their connection to poetry to a final activity using poetry journals. As a culminating activity, students compiled their works into a poetry journal which they were able to adorn with pictures and art. Through this activity, they realized the amount of knowledge they had acquired and how much they had accomplished through the year through the use of poetry.

Using poetry in the classroom has many advantages: it allows expressive freedom for students, provides teachers with tools for teaching creative language lessons, and encourages the use of the often overseen verbal-linguistic intelligence. Often teachers are reluctant to use poetry because they are worried that students will not find texts engaging. By the end of the year/unit, I observed their engagement with the written word and their new-found ability to see poetry not only as an instructional tool, but also as art.

Cristian Eden is a third grade teacher at St. Martin's Episcopal School in Atlanta, Georgia. He has been teaching for 10 years. When he is not teaching, he spends lots of time writing both poetry and prose.

To comment on this article e-mail comments@independentteacher.org.