Teaching Kids about Poetry
Local poet Steven Bates and I visited an elementary school this week to talk with 1st through 6th graders about poetry.
It’s been a couple of years since the last time I had the opportunity to talk to kids about writing, but I love doing these types of events and I hope to get to inspire kids more in the future.
I enjoy sharing my work with kids because it always amazes me how insightful they are and what captures their imagination. It was an unexpected joy to hear how they found beauty in my poetry, how they thought a piece was calming, or how they could picture exactly what I described in my poem. It was also exciting to hear the emotions my poems evoked in them.
The other part that I enjoyed was breaking their expectations of what poetry is or what it is supposed to be and opening up a world of possibilities for them. It’s thrilling to unlock their excitement for poetry and make it accessible for them and for them to discover that it could be about things that are very interesting to them. You should have seen the wonder when they found out they could write a poem about Minecraft, or that a poem could include horror or fantasy.
These are times that I cherish as an author.
That is so awesome! It sounds like you all had a lot of fun.
My big breakthrough with poetry was when I realized that poems didn’t have to follow a strict AB, AB rhyme scheme and that they didn’t have to even rhyme at all. That was such a colossal eye-opener. I was like “Whaat? Can you really do it that way?” When I do write poems nowadays, sometimes they will rhyme. Most of the time, though, I like to create a certain rhythm or word pattern. So, you can almost feel the beat of how it should be read (if that makes sense).
Yes. Steven writes poems that rhyme while I do not, so the kids were exposed to both kinds. It was a fun experience for me and I think the kids enjoyed it as well.