Yolanda U. Trapp
The theoretical reasons for believing that teaching poetry is a particularly effective way of expanding a child’s vocabulary derive from the difference in the statistical distribution of words that have been found between print and oral language. Some of these differences were studied by Hayes and Ahrens (1988), who have analyzed the distributions of words used in various contexts.
How will I teach poetry to children?
Walking through the suggested Objectives in this Curriculum, as I have, will give us a window into how children can be brought, step by step, to understand the architecture of their language, and how such understanding prepares them for the most critical academic undertaking of their lives: the mastery of reading and writing. I have the sense that every child who is successfully led through them – no matter the spareness of that child’s home environment – will glide ever so more easily into mastery of the alphabetic code and the door to literacy that it wedges open.
Here is a suggested list of methods and strategies I will introduce when teaching poetry to children.
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Listening Games: To sharpen children’s ability to attend selectively to sounds;
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Rhyming: To use rhyme to introduce the children to the sounds of words;
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Words and Sentences: To develop children’s awareness that language is made up of strings of words;
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Awareness of Syllables: To develop the ability to analyze words into separate syllables and to synthesize words from a string of separate syllables;
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Initial and Final Sounds: To show the children that words contains phonemes and to introduce them to how phonemes sound and feel when spoken in isolation.
Note: Lesson Plans will be develop in chapter IV.
Poetry reminds us that literature is a journey. The journey has a name (title), a purpose (topic), a vehicle (theme) and a destination (ending). And is also an important prose tool. It reminds us about the function of basic elements, the necessity of structure, and the universal truth in the ending.
