How to Teach Young Children to Read Through Poetry
Young children generally enjoy listening to nursery rhymes and poems. Poems for children tend to be short and fun. Parents and their children can recite them together, or a child can "recite" a poem in the same way as a joke. Teachers and parents can use poetry to practice reading, teaching children to read through poetry similar to teaching children to read a short story. With poetry, children usually do not mind reading and repeating poems again and again.
Instructions
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Choose a poem to read to the children every day or every week. Select poems, initially at least, that are short and amusing, as young children enjoy rhymes and poems that are comical.
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Use an overhead projector to display the poem, and then read it aloud to the children. One idea is to ask for volunteers to read the poem with you.
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Practice choral reading with the poem. Ask groups to read out certain sections of the poem. For instance, the children on the left of the classroom can read the first stanza and those on the right can read the second stanza.
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Ask the children to read the poem silently to themselves first. Ask some simple comprehension questions, such as "What do you think the poem is about?" to test the children's reading and comprehension.
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Divide the class into pairs for "buddy reading." Each child in the pair should read the poem to his buddy and then listens while his buddy reads it.
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Use the poem as a basis for phonic practice. Phonemes are the building blocks when learning to read. For example, ask the children to circle all of the nouns in the poem and go through them, breaking the words down into phonemes. Teachers and parents can also use poems to develop vocabulary. If children do not know what a word means, they can guess the meaning from the context. A dictionary should also be available for this type of work. Other language work includes identifying verbs and looking at the punctuation in a poem.
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Announce a competition where the children have to learn a poem by heart and then read or perform it in front of their classmates. To do this confidently, the children will have to read the poem carefully over and over again.
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Hand out a copy of your poem of the week, and ask the children to place it in a poetry folder or notebook. Once this folder has built up, the children can use this as a basis for homework to read the poems to their families.
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Tips & Warnings
Have plenty of poetry books available for the children to dip into. These should be suitable for their age and reading level.
Ask a local children's poet to come into the class and read to the children. Get the children to "perform" one of the poet's poems.
Not all children enjoy poetry, and some find it difficult to read and understand them. Use other forms of literature if this is the case, such as short stories and novels.
References
- Photo Credit little boy reading a book image by Renata Osinska from Fotolia.com
