April is National Poetry Month 2019, so it’s a time to celebrate words, word combinations, rhymes, beautiful thoughts and anything else that one can express with language. Children learn so much about words and language when they listen to or read poems or even when they just play around with rhyming sounds.
The World Wide Web offers dozens of resources to help 21st Century kids learn about poems and celebrate the month.
I discovered several good poetry resources over at the Reading Rockets website. Take some time to watch some of the videos available at the Poets on Poetry link and, on the same page, visitors can explore a link with an extensive list of video interviews with poets who write for children.
The Library of Congress has shared a Pinterest collection that features a wide range of poetry-related digitized images. I’ve used one of the images on this post.
The Family Friends Poems Website has posted a lesson about writing acrostic poems — the kind where a writer uses the first letter of a word to write each line. The site also has a list of 30 activities to help celebrate National Poetry Month. Kenn Nesbitt’s Poetry4Kids website features a How to Write Haiku lesson, along with as other poetry resources.
In my classrooms, no matter what age student I was teaching, I always kept a big jar filled with words — nouns, verbs, and adjectives mostly — each written on a small piece of tagboard. Sometimes, when students asked about new words we would look them up, and then each child would add the new word to the jar. When students experienced writing block, I’d suggest that they select between five and fifteen pieces of tagboard from the jar and see if the words might generate ideas for a poem or story. It worked every time!
And finally, I am including my two digital citizenship poems, inspired a couple of years ago by this blog and National Poetry Month.
- An Amusing but Pointed Welcome Poem for Kids With New Digital Devices
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Digital Kids to Parents — Don’t Break Your Own Rules! A Poem
Media! Tech! Parenting! 