Using Poetry
- amiller8979
- 14 hours ago
- 5 min read
by Amber Miller
April 15, 2025
Poetry is fun! (No, really!)
One reason to use poetry in your work with children is simply that it can be delightful. Poems can be funny, sad, engaging, and relatable. Plus, they are often relatively short, which can be appealing.
Poetry is fun ... to write!
Writing poetry is an excellent opportunity for students to explore new concepts or topics and express their thoughts. Using a mentor poem as a model can be a nice entry point for students.
April is National Poetry Month!
Scholastic selected Mandin—the global children’s publishing, education, and media company—to create the artwork for the 2025 NPM poster as part of a National Poetry Month collaboration with the Academy of American Poets.
A lesson plan featuring Nye’s poem is also available through the Academy’s 'Teach This Poem' series to bring the poster to life during National Poetry Month.
Building Fluency
What do we mean by the term 'reading fluency '? A commonly used definition is "automatic, accurate reading of continuous text with appropriate expression" (NICHD, 2000). In other words, fluent readers can read text with little apparent effort, leaving more cognitive energy available for comprehension. Oral reading fluency is a strong predictor of reading comprehension, especially in the elementary grades (Fuchs & Fuchs, 1992). Poetry lends itself well to fluency work through performance reading and phase-cued reading.
Performance Reading
One way that readers build fluency (specifically, accurate and automatic word reading) is by repeated exposures to words, and one way to get that repeated exposure is through a technique called repeated reading. Repeated readings are an instructional technique supported by research (NICHD, 2000); essentially, the student reads a short text aloud multiple times to improve various aspects of fluency with each reading. Often, you will see this technique targeting reading rate, where the student times themselves and works to enhance their rate with each read, but it doesn't need to be timed. You can read the same passage multiple times to increase accuracy, prosody, or understanding. Poetry often lends itself well to being read aloud and performed for an audience. Practicing for a performance creates a genuine purpose for rereading a text multiple times, which can help with motivation.
Phrase-Cued Reading
Prosody is a key element of reading fluency. It involves things like intonation, stress patterns, phrasing ... basically, a student reading with prosody would sound the way they do when they are simply talking. Poems work well for prosody work because they have natural rhythm and line breaks.
One aspect of prosody - phrasing - can be taught explicitly through a technique called phrase-cued reading. You teach students to group words in meaningful units by providing text in which phrase boundaries are expressly marked. Consider this procedure excerpted from Structured Literacy Interventions (Spear-Swerling, 2022, p. 108).
Additional Resources for Poetry
Consider cross-genre connections as a way to “hook your readers.” Often, we are called upon to engage students in reading, to pique their interest in a topic, and to help teachers incorporate their students into the overall curriculum. One way we can do that is by sharing poetry and matching it to the texts we present, whether they are picture books, folktales, or nonfiction. Read this Science Friday post, in which they explore several strategies for making connections between science and poetry.
10 Ways to Use Poetry in Your Classroom (Reading Rockets)
Overall, using poetry in the classroom or library enables students to listen, read, write, and think with fresh perspectives. Children who experience a poetry-rich environment will become lifelong readers and writers of poetry. This means that we need to enhance our poetry collections with poetry picture books as well as specialized, general, and individual anthologies. It also means that we must be current in our knowledge of what's new and available.
Advice from Kwame Alexander
Listen to acclaimed children's author/poet Kwame Alexander talk about how to get kids hooked on books using poetry in an NPR interview.
Kwame Alexander writes books that bend genres — novels about middle school boys, written not in prose but verse. And he does it well: His book The Crossover won the Newbery Medal last year for children's literature.
His new book is no different. Composed of a series of poems, Booked tells the story of a 12-year-old named Nick, a boy who loves soccer and hates books. But, as Alexander notes, there's a reason for that.
"His dad is a linguistic anthropologist," he says. "Growing up, my father, when I didn't know what a word meant, he'd say, 'Go look it up.' And he forced me to read the encyclopedia." After years of reading with his parents and loving it, this shift to the daunting and dull in literature turned Alexander off to reading.
"Somewhere around 10 or 11, when my father began to make me read these huge, educational and historical tomes that he had written, I fell out of love with books, because I was being forced to read books that I did not enjoy, that I was not interested in," he recalls. "And so, my love of literature — it was gone around fifth, sixth grade."
Spoiler alert: That estrangement from literature didn't last. And a great deal of the reason why he came back to books was wrapped up in poetry, a form that Alexander celebrates, for being able to say so much with so little.
"The power of poetry is that you can take these emotionally heavy moments in our lives, and you can distill them into these palatable, these digestible words and lines and phrases that allow us to be able to deal and cope with the world," he says. "I think it's one of the reasons why young people love reading novels in verse. It's because, on a very concrete level, it's not that many words, so it's not that intimidating to me. There's so much white space." And what's that white space for? Alexander says he learned that lesson himself from a young reader.
Kwame Alexander on whether diversity in children's literature is improving:
It's improving — and here's how I know it's improving: It's improving because it's not on someone besides you and me for it to improve. It's on us. And so, for things to improve, we have to act on it and move on those kinds of things that we feel are going to ensure that it improves. I don't spend a whole lot of time trying to worry or wonder or hope that things are going to get better. I spend a lot of time making things better. So yes, it's always improving for me. ...
I think Nikki Giovanni had this one quote. She said, "I write what I want, I write what I like, I'm going to dance naked on the floor, and if you don't like it, you can go home." If you can't handle it, you can go home — and to a certain degree, that's what I feel. I'm going to write what I want to write, I'm going to write about who I want to write. I'm going to write windows, I'm going to write mirrors, I'm going to write books that are going to elevate and empower young people, to help them become more human.
And ultimately, yes, I'm going to write because I think that things are improving, because I have a role to play in that. And so, at such a point when I believe that things aren't improving, it's going to be at a point when I'm not doing what I have to do.
I don't spend a whole lot of time trying to worry or wonder or hope that things are going to get better. I spend a lot of time making things better. ~ Kwame Alexander
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