Poetry in our classroom

When we think of poetry we think of older students in a classroom learning for the first time about poetry. Yet research shows and was stated in the book The Joy of Children's Literature that for students to really benefit in poetry they have to be exposed to it when they are children at a early age. "Children who are given many opportunities to read and write poetry on their own possess a remarkable understanding of the genre whereas children who have not had exposure typically don't understand what poetry is or how it differs from prose."

Some ways to bring poetry into the classroom are:

• Read poems aloud to children with energy, passion, and delight. One way to do this is to read poems that you as a teacher really enjoy.
• Encourage children to write in a poetic fashion, using all to the tools that poets use.
• Use poems all the time, in a quiet moment as a lesson.
• Explore poets as well as poems, letting the children come to know the writer of the words, through reading many poems by one poet.

Morgan Styles is a professor of Children's poetry and she stated "Why does children’s poetry matter? Children’s responses to poetry are innate, instinctive, natural – maybe it starts in the womb, with the mother's heartbeat? Children are hard-wired to musical language – taking pleasure in the rhythm, rhyme, repetition and other patterning of language that are a marked feature of childhood. As the poet, Tony Harrison, pointed out, it’s the scansion in poetry that unites the attention. Just think how, faced with fretful babies, we rock them rhythmically, dredging up old nursery rhymes, lullabies, or chants to amuse and pacify. This is a universal phenomenon, as Iona and Peter Opie, and other scholars, have shown in their research on the oral tradition. Even when we tell young children stories, they demand exact retellings and repetitions with the same cadences, rhythms, pauses and tones they heard the time before. This early sharing of musical language is often physical, too; bumping toddlers up and down on our knees and often ending with a kiss. Early poetry is about the expression of love"

I love how she stated how important children learning poetry is and how they all have it already wired in their hearts and body.

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