Robert Frost once said, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” So it’s no surprise that educators who want their students to think, feel, and express themselves are finding ways to use poetry in storytimes, lessons, or anytime they can. PW spoke with four such teachers and librarians about the ways they wax poetic in classrooms and libraries to offer poetry-filled storytimes and more. Click here to see previous stories in our Read Alouds That Rock series.
Karen Cardillo is a second-grade teacher at the Charter Academy in Angier, N.C., as well as a writer and poet. After two decades as an education publishing executive, Cardillo recently returned to the classroom after some time tutoring learners who were negatively impacted by effects of the Covid and remote learning, and found herself in second grade again.
Cardillo’s students benefit from her deep love and knowledge of literature—especially poetry. She said that she draws on poetry to supplement her ELA curriculum and teach additional phonics and spelling lessons. “I use poetry daily, beginning withour morning message to integrate phonics, vocabulary skills, and and problem-solving strategies,” Cardillo said. “It’s how I set the stage.”
Cardillo recently found the poem “Hello Spring” and used it to create a message for her students to recite, rewrite, and study closely. They look at the poem’s rhyming patterns, figurative language and phonetic awareness. “I purposely omit words and certain letters to teach our language arts skill of the day,” Cardillo said, “or lessons including word patterns—like the long e or suffixes like ‘-ful.’ ”
Because her second-grade curriculum is so full, Cardillo integrates poetry whenever she can across the curricular areas, and may read additional pieces as what she calls “rewards or treats. I just love introducing my kids to classic and new poetry,” Cardillo said. “I’m drawn to poems with rhyme and rhythm because they help us make connections with letters and sounds, and spelling patterns—and how beautiful poetry can sound! There’s a real purpose to sharing it.”
Her favorite poetry go-tos include The Illustrated Treasury of Poetry for Children edited by David Ross, anything written by Shel Silverstein, and Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months. Cadillo often uses these poems during her writers’ workshops as mentor texts to draw attention to the poetry’s figurative language—similes, metaphors, and alliteration—and to encourage her second grade poets to incorporate these elements in their own poetry. “My students especially love alliteration—tongue twisters,” Cardillo said. “The sillier the better!”
Tracy Lynn Scaglione is in her 20th year as library media specialist at the Dorsett Shoals Elementary School in Douglasville, Ga. Poetry is everywhere in her school library, thanks to her. “It’s embedded in our library’s storytimes, activities, and displays throughout the year—and our school,” Scaglione said. “Our library’s poetry section is not just dusted off for National Poetry Month. We use poetry books all year long.”
During storytimes, Scaglione often reads a variety of lyrical picture books including Dreamers by Yuyi Morales, Schomburg: The Man Who Built a Library by Carole Boston Weatherford, Wonder Walkers by Micha Archer, and The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson. “If you look carefully,” she said, “many of these books are poems told across 32 pages. I introduce these types of books to my students and we talk about the poetry’s rhyme, rhythm, and figurative language. And we listen to the influence of the language, the descriptive words. Afterwards, we talk about ways to incorporate these elements into our own writing.”
They talk about white space, too. “Our students discover that you don’t have to clutter the pages with words, and to drill down their writing to the fewest words on the page to get their point across,” Scaglione said. ”Poetry can do this brilliantly.”
She offers as many models of poetry as possible, for a multitude of reasons. “There’s so much variety in poetry that’s relatable and offers windows, mirrors, sliding glass doors—and something for everyone.”
Most recently, this included introducing novels-in-verse to fourth graders who just want to read graphic novels. “I started a book club to entice these kids to try novels-in-verse. One day, I quickly book-talked a number of these novels, and all of them got checked out,” Scaglione said. “When students finished reading them, they came back asking, ‘Do you have any more?’ Scaglione’s answer was a resounding “absolutely!” which then led to discussions about these novels-in-verse and “the building of a community” around the books.
“I want every student to feel they can be a reader,” Scaglione said. “My role is to fill in the gap between the classroom and students’ experience, focus on their interests, and help them develop their love of reading. It takes time building relationships between students and teachers to do this. But it’s so worth it.”
Yapha Mason is the new senior librarian at the Albany Academies in Albany, N.Y., and before that was a lower school librarian for 26 years at Brentwood School in Los Angeles. Mason was also a member of the 2015 Newbery Committee that chose the novel-in-verse Crossover by Kwame Alexander as that year’s winner.
Since making a cross-country crossover herself this past month, she’s eager to get acquainted with her new teachers and students, and to hit the ground running with poetry. “I hope to weave poetry in through library lessons in a variety of ways,” Mason said. “While I don’t know what the English teachers might be interested in doing just yet, I’m excited to work with them.”
Mason has a parade of poetry ideas and activities she’s used with her former students and that she can’t wait to tailor for her new ones. For starters, Mason likes to use poetry to supplement students’ nonfiction studies. In the past, she has read poems from Douglas Florian’s In the Swim with children who are studying the ocean, and Lee Bennett Hopkins’s My America: A Poetry Atlas of the United States with students who are researching the 50 states. “Tying in poetry is a great way to approach topics from many angles,” Mason said. “It seems to make topics more accessible to students in ways other formats don’t.”
To expose her students to different types of poetry, Mason holds Poetry Read Arounds where she pulls together many different anthologies and poetry books, and has her students sit in a circle and read a few poems from one book, and then pass it to the next person, and so on. She believes this circular activity whets their appetite for reading and writing poems.
“Poetry can impact students differently than prose, and make them think about the power of each word,” Mason said. She also believes that poetry gives students permission to color outside the lines. “I think it’s nice for students to see for themselves how all of the rules that they have learned—how to write, how to form a sentence—and how rules can be broken to make their writing even more impactful!"
Liza Barrett fell in love with poetry as a kid. She even won $5 in a poetry contest in second grade for her poem entitled “Carsick,” recalling a family car trip. Since then, her passion for poetry has only grown as a former middle school teacher (for more than 35 years) and a current school library teacher in her third year (after two years of remote teaching because of Covid) for middle and upper school kids in grad 7-12 at Mount Greylock Massachusetts Regional School in Williamstown, Mass.
The first thing Barrett did when they returned to school was truly poetic “Since no one in the last two years had been checking out poetry,” she said, “I went to the poetry section and pulled out all of the novels-in-verse, poetry anthologies, and studies on poets, and I put all of it out in front of the library with a beautiful sign. And it’s been circulating ever since.”
From book displays, Barrett moved on to a holiday celebration, Carry a Poem in Your Pocket Day. “I made this bag where I put copies of 25–30 different poems printed on colored paper and stood at the front door of the school as the kids walked into school. I gave one poem to everyone who would take one!” Barrett said. “All day long, you could see the kids looking at their poems, hear them asking each other which poems they got, and learning all kinds of poems—some famous, some obscure, and some they may have known from elementary school.”
For National Poetry Month this past April, Barrett invited each of her teachers to share a photo of themselves along with a favorite poem. Each day, she tacked a poem and the teacher’s photo to the library’s Read a Poem Every Day! bulletin board for a daily dose of poetry. She invited students to share their favorites, too.
Then Barrett let the powers of poetry take effect. “Poetry speaks to you in a way that other literature does not. The meaning can come so quickly to you,” Barrett said. “Kids are stressed and overwhelmed now more than ever. And, after all the things they have to read and comprehend for school, they can read a poem that is short and accessible; and, it can mean whatever they want it to mean.”
Then there’s poetry’s ability to break down walls and build relationships. “You can walk up to the board and read the poem of the day put up by a teacher or someone you know or don’t know, and it connects you and that person,” Barrett said. “Also, seeing a poem that someone likes makes you read it differently. You wonder why this is their favorite poem, and it connects you to them, too.”
Barrett believes poetry helps students connect with their inner selves, too. “Poetry can answer questions like: ‘Who am I? What is my place in the world?’ to discover who we are now, and who we want to become in the future,” Barrett said. “Poetry can get us thinking, wondering, and feeling things—and helps us become more of who we are!”
