Please share!

​"Happy"
First verse and Chorus
​by Pharrell Williams (2014)

​It might seem crazy what I'm about to say
Sunshine she's here, you can take a break
I'm a hot air balloon that could go to space
With the air, like I don't care, baby, by the way

Uh

Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof
Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth
Because I'm happy
Clap along if you know what happiness is to you
Because I'm happy
Clap along if you feel like that's what you wanna do
​

And for those of you who like book representations of songs, take a look at this posting on books based on songs.

Please share!

This journey began with a post on a personal page, asking friends and family what they liked to read as kids. Almost no one responded with poetry.

And this caused me to reflect. I wouldn't list poetry as a favorite as a kid either.

But oddly, when I taught poetry, I usually thought the students I worked with had fantastic poetry. They did an elegant job of hitting on the soft spot of an emotion or being real about an experience. I've said this before - I think kids experience life in a more complete way than we learn to as adults. Somewhere along the line, we learn to be polite, politically correct and guarded in our speech. Kids feel very intensely about events, have bright feelings, and sometimes blurt out profound words. 

I love to read. I love to experience other people's worlds and author's brains, in the form of their stories. I often tell people that I collect great storytellers.
​

Please share!

​

I left all that blank space so you could sit on that sentence for a few extra seconds. 

In high school, I had to read Shakespeare. It was on the required class list - I was forced. Not even a lot of it, but enough of it to know it meant that I didn't like poetry. It seemed flowery and dense at the same time but also, so, so, so, so OLD. A snooze. Hard. Boring.

I was uninterested. And, unfortunately, this is a fairly common thread among students. Even teachers don't always like to teach poetry. We focus on what the famous poems are, or what poetry form is (or has to be, or should be), we arm ourselves with rhyming dictionaries and we count out syllables. And we bore our students and completely miss the essence of poetry.

Poetry is something people do.

Okay, so let's unpack that. What does that mean? What DO people do?

We live our busy lives
We check our buzzing phones
We walk on bustling streets

and

We drive on congested highways
We crowd onto the train
We  check on our kids

and

We ask how people's days are going
We inquire within
We desire to know more

and

We tell our stories
We listen to our kids
We share our lives together

​and

Poetry is something people do.

"It nurtures a love and appreciation for the sound and power of language. Poetry can help us see differently, understand ourselves and others, and validate our human experience. It...enhances thinking skills, and promotes personal connections.... Such attributes deserve a closer look."

People write poems for the same reason they write stories - to share experiences, ideas, and feelings about the world.

Poetry helps kids "develop new insights, new ways of sensing their world."

​Poetry is something people do.
​

Let's do it together.
Click the link. The poem is about farting, so you can see where I'm going with this.
It IS something people do.

​
​In case you want to read more about what it is I am ACTUALLY going to do, read this first.

​Enjoy!

Huck, C.S., Hepler, S.I., & Hickman, J. (1993). Children’s literature in the elementary school. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt College.

Perfect, K.A. (1999). Rhyme and reason: Poetry for the heart and head. The Reading Teacher, 52, 728–737.