How to Grow a Poem: Tips on Teaching Poetry (and a Poem to Inspire!)

Read. Read. Read.

Students need to hear and read poems—lots of them: poems that rhyme; poems that make us clap our hands and dance to their rhythm; poems that paint vivid pictures; funny poems; poems that speak to all their feelings.

Take a poetry break during the school day. Stop the class and read a poem. Read poems and orchestrate brief performances, snapping fingers and clapping hands to the rhythm of a poem. After you’ve tilled the soil with reading lots of poems, invite students to write their own. They’ll have learned a lot from the poems they’ve read and listened to.

One of the easiest and most successful types of poems for students to write is the list poem. Students make a list of words or phrases from a topic they know well and then write an ending which can be a summation, a metaphor, or a repetition of a word on their list. For inspiration and examples read my anthology Falling Down the Page: A Book of List Poems (Roaring Brook Press).

Give poetry time to grow in your classroom. Trust that it will bloom!

 

How to Grow a Poem

by Georgia Heard

 

Cradle a seed in the palm of your hand.

When you plant it,

don’t dig a hole too shallow.

Keep it moist

but don’t drown it’s tender magic.

Give it space to thrive.

Dazzle it with light.

Allow time for it to root.

Suddenly, a fragile green sprout

will spring up out of the soil.

Watch over it,

but don’t tend too much.

Believe it will bloom.

You are a gardener at heart.

 

Happy Poetry Month!