Text types: Texts for fun & leisure

Poems & rhymes

Helping students to read and recite poems

Most poems are supposed to be read aloud with feeling and enthusiasm! Think about the meaning of the words, and try to make the reading lively and meaningful by varying the volume and pausing at appropriate moments. Exaggerate the intonation patterns and sentence stress and don't forget the importance of facial expression! Draw attention to the various sound effects, especially rhyme and rhythm. In fact, there are many technical effects that are used in poetry. Here is a quick outline of the most important ones.

Rhyme

When we say that a poem rhymes, we mean that the words at the end of each consecutive or alternate line have a similar sound (combination of vowel and consonant sounds): 

Humpty Dumpty

Note that the rhyme depends on the sound, not on the spelling (no, know, sew, though, woe). It is important to draw young learners' attention to the end part of words. Identifying rhyming endings is a skill that helps develop children's reading and writing. (Note that not all poems have to rhyme!) 

For a PrimeTeach teaching activity which can provide KS2 students with practice in rhyme, see:

Let's stay friends

Stress and rhythm

Rhythm is simply the pattern of strong and weak beats. All spoken English has a natural rhythm, and poets often exploit this rhythm (or 'metre') when writing poems. A good poet will vary the rhythm to emphasise the meaning. This can be seen even in simple nursery rhymes such as Humpty Dumpty.

We have rhythm in English because speakers use stress to make certain words (or syllables) prominent. Each word has its own stress pattern with one or more syllables being stressed and the others being unstressed. Patterns of stress also spread across whole clauses, or lines in a poem. For this reason, we say that English is a stress-timed language. The stressed syllables are like the 'beat' in a piece of music. The time between each 'beat', or stressed syllable, is approximately the same. For this reason some syllables are lengthened and some shortened to fit in with the beat. In contrast each syllable in a syllable-timed language (such as Cantonese) has the same stress and takes approximately the same amount of time. This is one of the main differences between English and Cantonese, and the reason why people sometimes feel that Hong Kong students speak too fast, in a monotone and with inappropriate stress patterns. Focusing on stress patterns in poetry can help to make students aware of stress in everyday English too.

The rhythm of English organises the sounds of the language into patterns which highlight the content words of a text. The stressed syllables establish the pattern. The unstressed syllables contract and expand to fit into the pattern. English speakers tend to keep the length of time between stressed syllables approximately the same, in the same way as the musical notes in each bar or measure of a piece of music take the same amount of time:

If English speakers want to fit more syllables between the stressed ones, they say the words faster in order to squeeze them in. If they want to fit fewer syllables between the stressed ones they say them slower in order to stretch them out. Often content words are stressed and stretched to become the beats while grammar words are weak and squeezed in between the beats.

Native speakers have an advantage over non-native speakers because they are exposed to nursery rhymes from a very early age and this way develop an in-built appreciation of the sounds and rhythms of English.

Creating special effects with consonant sounds

Poets use a range of devices to create special effects. One device which you can focus on is the repetition of consonant sounds. The technical term for this is 'alliteration'. This is also a feature of children's stories and you will recognise characters such as Sally the Squirrel, Boris the Bat, Granny Gong, MegaMonster and so on. It is always worth drawing attention to the beginning sound of a word as this is an important focus point when students are learning to read and spell.

Some consonant sounds convey a particular effect, eg words which have an 'sl' sound often suggest some sort of slow and slippery motion (slip, slide, slither) whereas two-syllable words which have a 't' sound in the middle often suggest a rapid, repeated motion (glitter, flutter, pitter patter) and one syllable words which end in a '-sh' sound often convey the sense of a sudden impact (crash, smash, bash).

Some words actually attempt to recreate a particular sound (crash, bang, pop, crunch, slap, rattle, puff, ding dong, tick tock, ping pong, rat-a-tat-tat, pitter patter ).  There is a special category just for the sounds which animals make (woof, bow-wow, ruff-ruff, meow, moo, neigh, whinny, oink, hee-haw, chirrup, cock-a-doodle do, cheep-cheep, growl ).
The technical term for this effect is 'onomatopeia'; however, a useful term to describe these words in the classroom is 'sound words'. If you would like some practice in identifying sound words, click here:

Poets use language to paint word pictures. When looking at poems, pay attention to the special images which are created and note the comparisons which are made. We use metaphor all the time when we are writing and speaking but it is a special feature of poetry and it is useful to draw students' attention to metaphor (eg Her smile was pure sunshine) and simile (Her smile was like sunshine).

When students know a poem well, encourage them to learn it by heart. This give them the pleasure of being able to repeat the poem any time they choose, plus the confidence which comes from knowing a whole text in another language.