Poetry holds a unique place in children’s literacy development, offering pathways to creative expression, emotional understanding, and linguistic mastery. When approached thoughtfully, poetry can become not just another subject to learn but a natural way for children to explore and express their understanding of the world. The key lies in integrating poetry seamlessly into children’s learning experiences while maintaining its integrity as a serious artistic form.

To begin, we must position poetry as a natural part of children’s literacy journey, rather than treating it as a separate or special unit of study. Just as children encounter stories, informational texts, and everyday writing, poetry should be a regular presence in their reading and writing experiences. This might mean starting each day with a poem, incorporating poetic elements across discipline areas, or simply having poetry books readily available alongside other reading materials. When poetry becomes part of the everyday fabric of learning, children develop a comfortable familiarity with its forms and possibilities.

The relationship between reading and writing poetry should be fluid and interconnected. Rather than first teaching children to appreciate poetry and then asking them to write it, these activities should occur simultaneously. When children discover a particularly effective metaphor in a poem they’re reading, they might immediately try crafting their own metaphors. When they write a line that captures a feeling perfectly, they can look for similar examples in published poems. This reciprocal relationship between reading and writing helps children understand poetry from both creator and audience perspectives.

Connecting poetry to the lifeworlds of children’ is crucial for meaningful engagement. Contemporary poetry teaching often fails when it relies too heavily on traditional themes that feel remote from children’s experiences. Instead, we should encourage children to write about their games they love, their favourite foods, their pets, their families, or anything else that matters to them. Poetry becomes powerful when children realise it can express their own thoughts, feelings, and experiences. A child writing about the excitement of winning a match in their sport can be just as poetic as one writing about daffodils.

Embodied activities can transform poetry from a purely cerebral exercise into an engaging, multisensory experience. Children might act out metaphors physically, create sound effects for onomatopoeia, or use movement to understand rhythm and meter. They might draw their poems, create poetry comics, or build three-dimensional poetry installations. These activities help children understand that poetry isn’t just words on a page but a full-bodied expression of human experience.

Performance plays a vital role in making poetry meaningful for children. Through performing poetry, whether their own or others’ work, children discover how words can come alive through voice, gesture, and interpretation. This performance aspect should be celebratory rather than evaluative, creating opportunities for children to share their poetic voices with supportive audiences. Poetry slams, classroom poetry cafes, or simple poetry sharing circles can all provide affirming spaces for young poets to be heard.

The selection of poems we share with children should reflect the full range of human experience and poetic expression. While children certainly enjoy humorous or playful poems, they’re also capable of engaging with serious themes when these are presented appropriately. A thoughtful poetry curriculum might include everything from playground rhymes to contemporary free verse, from ancient epics to hip-hop lyrics. This diversity helps children understand that poetry can express any aspect of human experience.

Crucially, we must avoid trivialising poetry in our attempt to make it accessible to children. Too often, children’s poetry is reduced to simple rhymes about cute animals or silly situations. While there’s nothing wrong with such poems occasionally, children deserve exposure to poetry that tackles real emotions, complex ideas, and genuine human experiences. They can handle sophisticated poetic concepts when these are presented in ways that connect to their understanding of the world.

Success in teaching poetry to children ultimately depends on our ability to maintain this balance between accessibility and challenge, between play and serious engagement, between personal expression and artistic craft. When we achieve this balance, poetry becomes neither a dreaded classroom requirement nor mere entertainment, but a vital form of expression that children can use to explore and share their understanding of themselves and their world.

By integrating poetry naturally into literacy learning, connecting it to children’s lives, making it physically engaging, celebrating performance, offering diverse examples, and maintaining high artistic standards, we can help children develop not just as poetry readers and writers, but as individuals who understand the power of creative expression in all its forms.

 

16/2/2025