Hello again mates! One more week writing in the post! Today I want to talk about the class that we had with Raquel about poetry, and how to teach it or work with it in our classes.

When we say poetry, we always think in Shakespeare, love sonnets and old things like that, but poetry is more than these things, how to involve our students in this “complicated” world? Because it is true that for our students (especially if they are in their first primary years) can be difficult create their own poems, so, how can we help and motivate them to do it?

I have been investigating on internet and I have found some ideas that I would want to share with you, because as a future teachers I think they could work really good, here I am going to let some web pages that for me are interesting:

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/tips-teaching-poetry

About this page, I have to say that I don’t really like the first part of reading, because the ideas that use are basically about reading, memorizing, reading and memorizing, that are things that in my opinion are not really good to motivate our students (in my opinion, and as a student that had to memorize some poems, it is frustrating and bored). But, the second part of the page, “other activities” I think that is a great idea create a newspaper where children can express themselves and write their thoughts and feelings and you motivate them to work hard because is something that other people are going to read! It has a lot of alternatives really catchy for them, like visiting a place where people recite poems, or record themselves to see how they read poems. I really love these ideas.

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/poetry-teaching-tips-new-teachers-lisa-dabbs

This second page, for me, is very interesting, because describe short and simple activities that you can make with your students, and I am sure that they will enjoy it. For example I remember in the school that we create one shape poem, and I enjoyed it a lot. Another one that I found amazing is the one using music. Could you imagine something better than read your favorite song as you were a poet? I can’t!

I have been reading about haikus too, I let here a page explaining a little bit what haikus are and some examples, and I think that could be a good resource to use in our classes, because are simple poems in some cases a bit funny, so they could create their own haikus (for example, each student write a short line, and then the teacher mix the sentences and read one by one randomly, creating crazies haikus) I am sure that children will laugh a lot with the results, and they learn another kind of poems from other country.

http://www.tallerdeescritores.com/ejemplos-de-haiku.php

And that is all for today! I hope that you like this post, and give you some ideas to help children with poetry!