The Beyond Educational Value of Creative Expression, Mastery of Language Skills, Confidence Building and a Lifelong Love for Writing
You may or may not know this but poetry is important. One day I will write more about my experiences as a first year third grade ELA teacher, but for now, all that I really want to write about is poetry. Poetry and how, despite having to defend it again and again to various forces and admin, it transformed lives and changed the game for many of my students struggling with writing, reading, and confidence.
Sharing poetry with children of all ages is vital. Poetry, for one, is creative storytelling and fun expression with words. Reading poetry to children catches their attention and holds it - poetry is, afterall, usually shorter than novels. The beat, the quickness, the length and the cadence of poetry can actually compete with a round of Fortnite or for my students, wishing they could be home playing Fortnite.
Reading poetry to kids is amazing. But even more amazing is the after. After reading the poetry it is time to discuss it for anything and everything - it is all important, all relevant, and all connected. Kids will ask questions about meaning, about words, about feelings, about why things happened the way they happened, about the poetic form, and about how to write a poem just like that one - I promise, they will. And yes, the kids will lead the conversation because they are invested in the poem. There’s no better feeling than seeing kids care about something that is also good for their minds!
Teaching poetry to kids is important and a great idea. I have tried to narrow it down to a few areas - with examples. Poetry fuels a passion for creative expression and storytelling, poetry is great for confidence building when it comes to ELA and life skills, poetry gives students a way to master language, grammar, and vocabulary, and lastly, poetry sparks a love for writing, and by extension reading. It is also nice to know that teaching poetry meets all of the common core standards - but I won’t get into that here.
Creative Expression and Storytelling
Poetry is creative expression and storytelling at its most accessible. There are forces out there that want to teach kids that writing is just a formula, that it is dry and that you have to use different colored pens like a science experiment to get it all just right. I am not a fan of these forces. I am a fan of the fairy tale, the creation, the imagination, the story. Kids want to create. They want to make something happen. They want power. They want some control over their lives and experiences. They can have this in storytelling, and they can really have this with poetry. I loved seeing the creative poems my students came up with, even when we had to work with the same topic, let’s say Winter - kids brought out their A game in poetry with stories of snowmen and sledding, staying home from school, or imaginary creatures who loved to eat snow.
Confidence Building
Students usually love science. They usually like, and a lot of them love, math. But in my experience, loving ELA is not something my third graders came into school being very big on. Poetry changed this. And it was often a confidence issue. They are told there’s a right way and a wrong way to read, to write, to think so many times even in elementary school. Being shown new ways to play with language builds their confidence when it comes to their reading and writing abilities. When they share their poems with the class, this builds their public speaking skills as well. I saw so many students who were so shy and afraid to read their first poem. With a little encouragement and after seeing how good it felt to share something they created with their peers, these same students could not wait to go up to share another, and another!
Mastery of Language, Grammar and Vocabulary
Many of the poetic forms I taught to my students involved understanding things like syllables, for haiku, and grasping parts of speech, for the classic kids poetic forms of Cinquain and Diamante. By the end of the unit no child asked me what an adjective was - they all knew! What a win for the basics, right? Poetry can teach the exceptional and the outstanding, it can give students a love for words and language, increase their vocabulary and it can also just help those struggling with the basics get a firm grasp before moving on to the next level.
Love for Writing, and by extension, Reading
Of course, last but not least, as someone who has always loved reading and writing it has long been my goal as a person, mother, writer, teacher to help others find their love for writing and reading. And poetry did this for my students. I have over 80 ELA students who come to me in groups of 25 or so. Almost every single one of them enjoyed learning about poetry. Before the poetry unit many students would ask “how many sentences do I have to write?” just because they wanted to do the bare minimum and be done with the assignment. While writing and working on poems many of these same students would finish a haiku and ask if they could write another. A night and day difference and something that really made my heart happy.
Poetry can change lives, we know this. I have written about it, gushed over it, praised it, I have tried to live it in all of the ways - and now I can say that I have been lucky enough to see poetry change the lives of my students. I can’t wait to see what they do with their newfound love of words and expression!