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Poetry offers wonderful opportunities for reading, writing, speaking, and listening
practice for ELLs. Poetry also gives students a chance to expand vocabulary knowledge, to
play with language, and to work with different rhythms and rhyme patterns. Getting students
to think about poems they are familiar with can help make the transition into Englishlanguage poetry smoother. Working with poetry from different countries and languages is also
an excellent opportunity to encourage students to share their cultural heritage with the class,
and to take pride in an art form that is part of their identity and may have been passed down
across many generations.
Poetry can range from simple and fun to complicated and abstract. Depending on the
English level of the students, there are a variety of ways to start bringing poetry in the
classroom.
Talk about the differences between stories and poems. Provide students with a copy of a
short story they've already read and a short poem. Ask them to work in groups and make a list
of the differences between the two pieces, noting characteristics such as length or style. Have
students share those differences with the class.
Start with poems that are manageable. Make sure the poems you present first have simple
and familiar language, images, and themes so that they are accessible to ELLs. We can use
poetry with predictable language patterns, repeated words, phrases, lines, and identifiable
rhymes, so that they are easier for students to read.
Give students a chance to illustrate poems. Have students work in pairs to discuss and
illustrate a short poem, or one or two lines of a longer poem. This will encourage them to
think about meaning, and then express their interpretation in their own way. Ask students to
share their illustrations with the class so that everyone has a chance to think about the
different meanings that their classmates discovered.
Read a variety of poems out loud. Reading a poem out loud brings it to life. Students will
begin to understand and notice different rhythms, rhymes, and feelings represented, as well as
understand how the language creates an image or mood. The poem should be read in a natural
voice, and the teacher can highlight the fact that you do not always stop at the end of each
line, but instead use the poem's punctuation as a cue to where the pauses should be.
Be sure to include some poems written for kids and young adults. Children's poetry can be
so much fun, and it also gives students a chance to talk about important ideas and feelings.
Discuss the vocabulary used in different poems. Poems offer a wonderful opportunity to
teach new vocabulary related to a topic or idea, as well as a chance to think about language.
Why did the poet choose a certain word? How does that word make you feel? What kind of
sound does the word convey? Students may want to pick a word or phrase that is meaningful
from a poem and write it on a "poetic word" wall sort of a graffiti wall of sentiments.
Students can continue to add to the wall as they discover new items, or even as they write
their own poems.
Give students a chance to read poems out loud together as a class and to each other.
Reading poems out loud will improve students' confidence and oral language skills, as well as
their reading fluency.
Discuss grammatical/syntax patterns found in poems. Poems may have unusual sentence
structures that students will not encounter in prose text. Analyzing such sentences can help
ELLs develop a better understanding of conventional English syntax.
Continue reading poetry out loud to your students. When introducing more complex
poems with increasingly difficult English vocabulary, read the poem through and ask students
for an initial impression regarding the meaning of the poem. A student might say, "I think it's
about someone who lost someone they love." This can begin a discussion with questions such
as, "Why do you think that? Is there a certain word or phrase that makes you think that? Does
someone else have a different idea?"
Encourage students to share their personal interpretations. Students will soon see that
each reader finds a different meaning in the poem, and that's ok. Students shouldn't be focused
on looking for the right and wrong answers.
Here are some different types of poems to try in the classroom:
ACROSTIC:
In Acrostic poems, the firet letters of each line are aligned vertically to form a word:
Elegantly and efficiently shaped
Good to eat
Great fun to find at Easter
Smooth shelled
ALPHABET:
Each line begins with the letters of the alphabet in order:
A young girl was busy working on her project for school
But suddenly she had a question.
Could this be her lucky day?
Deciding to find out, she
Entered her backyard and
Found hundreds of green shamrocks waiting for her.
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL:
Write a poem about yourself using this form or another poetry form.
Line 1: __ Your name