Poems A'plenty
Jack George

Over the 35 years of my career, I've spent a part of most days sharing poems with my students. Our poetic wordplay begins on the first day of school and continues daily throughout the year. It takes no more than five to ten minutes each day — time well-spent when you consider the richness of the experience. My students enjoy words, present orally, work with rhyme, rhythm, meter, expression, body language, reading, writing, and more skills than I can list.

Some of the poems are selected from my chart stand, which contains about 75 of my favorites written on sheets of oaktag. Others are selected from books by Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky, Jeff Moss, Judith Viorst, Nikki Giovanni and Langston Hughes, among others, I also have copies of Mother Goose.

Old favorites
One Potato, Two Potato, Three Potato, Four by Mary Lou Colgin (Gryphon House, 1991) is a favorite book that provides a great selection of sidewalk rhymes and nursery rhymes that can be learned quickly because of their catchy sounds and images. I use a number of these poems as springboards into language lessons because they're rich sources of punctuation, capitalization, paragraphing, conversation, parts of speech, verb tenses and speaker tags, to name a few.

Ogden Nash is also a wonderful choice if you enjoy the puns he created and the off-beat sense of humor he shared in his work. I have found that my classes enjoy Mr. Nash and want to return to his poems again and again. As we studied animals, we visited and revisited a number of his animal poems, such as: "The Panther," "The Octopus," "The Eel," "The Hippopotamus" and "The Porcupine," among others. In these poems, using his uncanny wit, he presents a few animal facts which are cleverly embedded in each piece.

Impromptu performances
I don't insist on memorization, however, I do encourage it by groups. I am delighted that most of the kids in my classes have responded with overwhelming support and have made a quick task of memorizing many of the pieces I present each year. This year, I asked my fourth graders if they would like to present a poem to our secretaries in the main office. As is true in most schools, we have a very hard-working core of office personnel who spend many hours under great pressure to keep the building naming. I thought some poetic relief might be in order.

One day on our way back from gym class, we dropped into the office, lined up around the room and recited two poems. The kids were excited and the secretaries enjoyed the brief interlude. When we returned to our room, the response was more that I expected.

"Can we do that again?"

"That was fun, let's do it every day."

"Can we learn some more to present?"

"Let's learn some longer ones, too."

The animated conversation went on for several minutes with most of the class excited by the impromptu presentation and the reaction from our small audience. Due to the enthusiasm of the kids, we chose several other poems to work on and have presented poems nearly every other week since the beginning of the year. We have also shared poems with our gym staff, many of our second graders and just about anybody who wants to listen to our poetic play.

Windows of opportunity
One of the most critical elements to the success of this idea is the kids help in the decision-making about pieces to use. I have found that when all the kids have a part in every poem the effort is much greater, so I take time to have the kids help me divide the pieces into sections to give everybody a role. A small idea has blossomed.

My joy in this activity is the fact that the children have taken to the wordplay so quickly and have found that language can be fun. This is a simple activity with far-reaching effects that, for some, will be with them for life. There's always a time and a place for poetry, we simply have to open those windows of opportunity. We need to keep poetry, verse and rhyme alive in our lives. Play with words and share the joy — it can be contagious.

(C) 2001 Teaching Pre K - 8. via Bell&Howell Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved

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