The main focus of my article was about children’s poetry, the importance of it, and the almost non-existence of it in the elementary classroom. Gill talks about how poetry, when implemented in elementary classrooms, is often taught using simple poems like “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” or is taught using poems from the classical adult poets like William Shakespeare. In doing this, educators make poetry into something that needs to be decoded, something that has a hidden message. When educators make poetry all about famous adult poets, they do a disadvantage to learners, forgetting to teach them what poetry is all about. Poetry is supposed to be a genre of writing where children can share experiences, thoughts, and emotions through a short concise piece of writing. Poetry is supposed to teach learners the importance of word choice, in helping to create images, strike emotions, and create an impact on readers. Gill believes learners should be provided opportunities to engage with poems written for children. There is children’s poetry out there, and it is essential that children learn from children’s poems so they can learn how to write poems, instead of focusing on how to decode them. Learners need to learn how to write with intense imagery and feelings to create an impact. As Gill points out, when educators focus on learners decoding adult poems, “The emphasis of poetry turns to one of knowledge- knowing the types of poems and the names of major poets- rather than on understanding, enjoyment, or participation with poetry” (Gill, 2007). Gill talks about how learners need to be introduced to authentic children’s poets, so they can learn what poetry is all about, how to write it, gain a desire to become a poet, and find the enjoyment in reading it (Gill, 2007).
Even if I had not had an immense passion for writing poetry and teaching poetry to learners, I would have after reading this article. Being in kindergarten, I would definitely start to use children’s poetry in my classroom. Right now, my collaborating teacher has a poem of the week that the learners read, memorize, and place into their poetry binders. However, after reading this article, I discovered that all the poems she uses are the simple poems like “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” None of the poems really focus on what poetry is all about: intense emotions, imagery, word choice, and a way to share thoughts and experiences. Thus, I think that I would add children’s poetry into the morning routine, but also into the word study aspect of the literacy curriculum. I would keep word study as a focus of words, and learning beginning sounds, rhyming, ending sounds, etc., but I would add a branch of word study that focused on poetry. The focuses would range anywhere from thinking of descriptive words to learning about onomatopoeias. Learners could learn about word choices through listening to poems that are strong in word choice and poems that are weak. Learners would start to notice different words they could chose and so on. I think this would really impact their writing during writer’s workshop, as it would hopefully get them to be more descriptive in their writing, and think about their word choices.
As a teacher, I think that before I enacted poetry as part of word study, I would need to figure out the core mini-lessons I could do with my kindergarteners to make it developmentally appropriate and beneficial to them. Having not ever thought about how I would incorporate poems in word study, it would be a little bit of a challenge to find really strong poems to highlight the different aspects of poetry I would want to highlight. Furthermore, before I could implement a poetry branch into word study, I would need to know where my writers currently were with their word knowledge. I know, right now, my learners are just learning how to stretch out words for beginning sounds. I would need to continually informally assess their writing and their word understanding before I could start to add more concepts. All the poetry lessons would have to go off what the learners know about already about words.
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