Composing Music
Poetry can be set to music as children create melody and identify the rhythmical elements. One group of talented 7-year-olds composed music to accompany their own sad tale of a princess who was captured during a battle and taken from her palace. Her knight-in-arms wandered the lonely countryside in search of her, while the poor princess grieved for him in her prison tower. The children made up a musical theme for each of the main characters, which they repeated during the various movements of their composition. The story was first told to their classmates and then the song was played on the autoharp and glockenspiel. Older students composed a three-movement rhythmical symphony for Ged in Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. A recorder repeated Ged's theme in appropriate places in this percussion piece. When literature provides the inspiration for children's musical compositions, children's appreciation for both literature and music will be enriched.

Experimenting with Poetry
Poetry provides many opportunities for children's writing. Eve Merriam's Quiet Please invites children to imagine quiet sounds "ferns fluttering by the pond" or the "invisible writing of butterflies." A group of 7- and 8-year-olds studied Tomie de Paola's The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog and created additional verses such as "She went to the hen house to get him an egg/But when she got back, he was holding his leg." After reading The Book of Pigericks by Arnold Lobel, a small group of fourth graders wrote their own "Bugericks. An excellent collection of poetry in various forms along with a concise explanation of each form can be found in Paul Jeneczko's A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms, illustrated by Chris Raschka.

de Paola, Tomie. The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her og. Harcourt Brace, 1981.
Jeneczko,Paul. A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms. Illustrated by Chris Raschka. Candlewick, 2004.
Lobel, Arnold. The Book of Pigericks.& Harper & Row, 1983.
Merriam, Eve. Quiet, Please. Illustrated by Sheila Hamanaka.  Simon & Schuster, 1993.

Readers, Theater Poetry
Readers' theater also works for some poetry. Poems that include conversation, such as Karla Kuskin's "Where Have You Been, Dear?" or "The Question," found in her collection Dogs & Dragons, Trees & Dreams, have been successfully interpreted in this way. Children reading Mollie Hunter's The Mermaid Summer might also wish to read "Overheard on a Saltmarsh," the conversation between a nymph and a goblin about a necklace of green glass beads. This is in Isabel Wilner's collection The Poetry Troupe, which includes many poems for choral reading and readers' theater.

Hunter, Mollie. The Mermaid Summer. Harper & Row, 1988.
Kuskin, Karla. Dogs & Dragons, Trees & Dreams. Harper & Row, 1980.
Wilner, Isabel. The Poetry Troupe. Scribner's, 1977

Publishing Poetry on the Web
Several sites on the World Wide Web are dedicated to the publication of children's poetry. Visit these sites with your students and discuss the poetry that you find there. Encourage your students to develop poems for submission to these pages. As noted previously, it is important to consider your school's policy on parental permission for posting student work on the Internet.

Young Poets
http://www.loriswebs.com/youngpoets/
A collection of original poetry written by kids age 5-18.

Art as Inspiration for Poetry
In her book Heart to Heart: New Poems Inspired by Twentieth-Century American Art, Jan Greenberg has compiled a collection of poems that were inspired by the viewing of works of art. Greenberg invited 43 poets to select a piece of modern art which inspired them to write. Try this activity with your students. Be sure to have large size true-color reproductions of various works of art available. Allow children to choose a work of art that intrigues them rather than assigning them a piece. Having choice increases students' motivation to write. You may want to model the composition process by thinking and writing aloud as you draft a poem in response to a work of art that you have selected. A variation on this activity would involve children first in the original creation of a work of art. They might write a poem in response to their piece of art or to that of a classmate. If you feel that your students need to engage in a planning activity before drafting their poem, you might choose to use a recording sheet, which prompts children to consider their sensory responses, similar to the one provided.

Greenberg, Jan. Heart to Heart: New Poems Inspired by Twentieth-Century American Art. Abrams, 2001.

Poetry Response as a Quickwrite
Poetry can provide inspiration for many other forms of writing. Quickwrites are activities designed to build student writing fluency as well as to capture interesting thoughts, responses, and language snippets that might be developed into longer pieces of writing. A provocative poem or a poem that is close to students' own experiences can serve as an effective prompt for a quickwrite. Select a poem suitable for your students' interests and age levels. Explain to students that you are going to read the poem aloud twice, following which, they will write continuously for five minutes. During this time, they should not be concerned about writing conventions (punctuation, spelling, paragraphing, etc.); they should just concentrate on getting their ideas down on paper. Linda Rief, master educator, suggests providing open-ended writing invitations following the reading of the poem. For example following a reading of Langston Hughes's "I Loved My Friend," you might invite students to "write about a friendship you have had or write about whatever the poem makes you think of." At the conclusion of the writing time, give students the option to share what they have written with a classmate or with the whole class. Keep the quickwrites in a writing folder so that students may revisit them when they need inspiration for longer pieces of writing.

Hughes, Langston. The Dream Keeper and Other Poems. Illustrated by Brian Pinkney. Knopf, 1994 (1932).

Chapter 8 Recording Sheet (20.0K)