Using Poetry to Teach Foundational and Advanced Reading Skills

by Elizabeth Tricquet 

Poetry—some love it and some are intimidated by it. More and more, states are including an increased emphasis on poetry in their standards updates. Poetry is a valuable teaching tool for students of all ages because it can reinforce early reading skills for elementary school students and it encourages critical thinking skills in older students.   

Poetry in the Elementary Grades 

From the cradle, poetry is part of the life of children. Parents, loved ones, and caregivers sing songs and recite nursery rhymes to babies. They are a form of poetry. Those nursery rhymes and songs help build a foundation for future phonological awareness and phonics skills reinforcing a child’s understanding of sounds and rhyming.  

Using poetry in elementary classrooms can help teachers continue to support students as they master phonological awareness, phonics, and fluency.  Here are ways elementary school teachers can incorporate poetry into their instruction to support reading foundation skills: 

Phonological Awareness:

• How Many Rhyming Words?—Read aloud a short poem and have students identify rhyming words. To extend this activity, have students create more rhyming words for the ones identified in the poem (example: identified cat and bat in the poem and students come up with pat and mat).  Rhyming is the most basic of all phonological awareness activities. Struggling with rhyming can be an early indicator of reading challenges and teachers can use rhyming activities to monitor students.  
• How Many Syllables?—Using whatever poem you are working with, pick a few words to have students clap out or tap out how many syllables are in the word. Knowing how many syllables a word has lays the foundation for using syllabication rules for decoding.  
• Ssssame Ssssound—Read poems that illustrate alliteration like “Peter Piper.” Have students identify for the repeated sound or alliteration. Listening for the repeating sounds helps students start isolating individual phonemes. And drawing out continuous sounds like /s/ make reading poems with alliteration even more fun. 

Phonics: 

• Make a Word Family—After reading a poem as a class, have students circle the rhyming words in the poem. Then have them create a list of other words that are part of the word family. Recognizing word families helps students become more efficient decoders and expands vocabulary.  
• Where Are the Long Vowels?—After reading a poem aloud as a class, identify all the words that have a particular vowel sound. Have the students create a list of vowel teams that make the long vowel sound (example- o_e, oa, ow, oe all make the long o sound). This activity reinforces learning long vowel sounds in context.  

Fluency: 

• Repeated Readings—To increase student engagement, choose fun or silly poems from poets such as Shel Silverstein or Jack Prelutsky and have students do repeated readings. Repeated readings of poems increase fluency and allow students to work on pacing, prosody, and expression.
• Paired Reading—Paired reading is when students work together to trade off reading parts (such as lines or stanzas) of poems. My students always enjoyed reading poems from Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices by Paul Fleischman. Students should read the poem together multiple times to increase their fluency and work on their pacing, prosody, and expression. 

Poetry in the Middle Grades and High School 

By the time students reach middle and high school, poetry instruction is often greeted with a groan by both teachers and students. We all remember having to read poetry that uses difficult, archaic language and deciphering each word. But it doesn’t have to be so unpleasant for students. Using creative poetry activities increases engagement and students will benefit by practicing critical thinking skills, expanding vocabulary, improving reading fluency, finding an avenue for self-expression, and purposeful communication. Here are some ways to bring fun to teaching poetry and analysis skills in middle and high school classrooms:

• Analyze that Song—Many songs are poems. One way to engage students is to mix modern songs into instruction. Using songs that many students are familiar with increases engagement, and students are more likely to engage critical thinking and analysis to decipher multiple layers of meaning in the song.  
• Themes Both Old and New—After wrapping a unit about poetry of a particular literary movement, have students choose one piece that particularly speaks to them. Students must identify the theme(s) expressed in the poem. Then they must find a song that conveys those same theme(s). Next, they present an annotated version of the song lyrics where they identify the language and symbolism that supports the identified theme(s). This activity leads to some lively classroom discussion while having students practice their analysis and critical thinking skills.  
• Blackout Poetry—Have students take a copy of a page from their favorite story or novel and find the poetry on the page. Students need to black out words on the page to make their poem visible. This activity has students focus on the impact of individual words in the poem and how those words come together to create meaning. Blackout poetry also helps students gain confidence and reduces anxiety about creating a poem from scratch. 

While poetry is a valuable instructional tool for teaching foundational reading skills like phonological awareness and phonics to more advanced skills like analysis and critical thinking, it can be engaging too. Members of Edmentum’s product team (all former teachers) compiled this list of poetry activities and we hope that your students enjoy these activities as much as our team did. Do you have any other poetry activities you use in your classroom? Or are there other engaging poets your students enjoy reading? 

For more of our top resources to help you support a strong, evidence-based foundation for literacy aligned with the Science of Reading, visit Edmentum's Science of Reading Toolkit. 

About the author 

Elizabeth Tricquet has over two decades of experience in education. In her current role as Lead Learning Designer at Edmentum, Elizabeth is passionate about developing effective, high-quality resources for students and teachers.   

Elizabeth has worked at Edmentum since 2016 in a variety of positions including Content Designer, Assessment Specialist, and Learning Designer. She has worked on a variety of products including Exact Path, Study Island, and Benchmark Assessments.   

Prior to working at Edmentum, Elizabeth had nearly 10 years of experience in the classroom teaching grades 1, 3 and 4 with a focus on helping struggling readers and students with learning difficulties. While teaching, Elizabeth earned her National Board Certification for Early and Middle Grades Literacy. She then worked at the Florida Department of Education's Test Development Center as an ELA Content Specialist. During that time, Elizabeth worked on state-wide summative assessments.