Blog post 10-12

The Forgotten Genre of Children’s Poetry
by Sharon Gill

Summary:

This article started off by the author expressing her concern with the lack of children’s poetry books that are available. She stressed that children are told that poems are written by “great poets” such as Homor, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Emily Dickenson, and Walt Whitman. The books that were supposedly “children’s poetry” was really for adults that could possibly be used by children. She was concerned that none of the great 20th century children’s poets were forgotten about. She also expressed concern that children will have a “mistaken idea of what poetry is.” (Gill, 622) She states that great poets create the poems but it “can only be understood and evaluated by academics whose job it is to tell the rest of us what the poem means.” (Gill, 622) This is also a problem in our school systems. The emphasis is placed on who the great poets are and what the different types of poems are. Poetry lessons are not often focused on understanding the poems, enjoying them, or participating in them. Teachers need to understand the definition of poetry and why we should need it in order to incorporate it into their classroom. Teachers also need to find appropriate children’s poetry books from various sources to add to their classroom library. “It is up to teachers to make sure that poetry in not a forgotten genre.” (Gill, 625)

Discuss:

The reason I initially chose this article was because we have been doing a poetry unit in my class for about 4 weeks now during our shared reading lessons. I was interested to what the author of the article wanted to say about poetry and possibly give me some insights to whether our poetry unit was effective or not. From this article, I learned that our poetry unit is fairly rare in a school setting and we are doing a good thing by exposing our students to age-appropriate poems. Our poems are designed for young children and typically come with an illustration to help build upon the text. I have actually taken on this lesson a few weeks ago and really see the benefits to showing this genre of literature. We have our poems individually written out on large sheets of paper and we introduce one poem per week. Each day of the week serves as a different purpose. Monday we introduce the poem, show body movements that supplement the text and explain the author’s meaning in the poem. Tuesday we have the children make personal connections with the text. We ask them to tell us a personal story that helps them to understand what the author is telling us through the poem. Wednesday is devoted to showing patterns within the poems. It focuses on the structure of the poems. On Thursday, we focus on finding visual patterns in the text such as rhyming words. Friday is their oral language lesson where they each will go in front of the class and recite the poem into the microphone. Within each day, we explain why it is important for them to learn each individual skill and how it will help them in other academic areas. We also teach return sweep, one-to-one correspondence, directionality, word and letter recognition, and sight “snap” words that make up our word wall. We are constantly stressing the relationship between reading and writing in our classroom. We actually use the words synonymously within our discussions. Each day provides a new skill for each child to incorporate into their reading and writing.

Identify:

As a professional teacher, we need to understand the meaning and purpose of poetry ourselves before we can teach it to our students. We need to make sure that we are not just teaching types of poems or “great poets” to our class. Our class library should include rich, age-appropriate poetry books that our students can read. We should be focused on increasing understanding on the meaning of the poems and enhancing enjoyment in reading poetry. As teachers, we need to help our student’s understand what poetry is and what it is all about. We should also model and scaffold the children to write their own poetry in writer’s workshop.

Module Ideas:

This online module made me think a lot about how I can enhance my writer’s workshop to include a great deal of informative and informal assessment and how to include different genre’s instead of the typical fiction writing. There is so much that can be done during writer’s workshop that I was not aware of because I have yet to see a great variety done. I know that as the year progresses, I will see what different forms of assessment my CT uses and will model her techniques at first. However, when I implement my unit lessons, I would like to use a variety of different types of assessment. I believe that this will be the most effective form of assessment when it comes to my children’s writing. I want to ensure that I assist each child with their own individual needs so that they can become successful writers in the future. The only way I can help them is to find gaps in their development and work to fill those gaps.

Gill, Sharon. The Forgotten Genre of Children's Poetry. N.p.: International Reading Association, 2007. 622-25. Print.