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Dear English Teachers,

Some of these poems I have written especially for you, but most of them have been written for your students. Since English is for many of them a foreign language, I have tried to make these poems easy to understand and less culturally alien than many other children's poems in English, which are mainly written for children who use English as a first or second language. By using these simple poems with your students, I hope you will be able to help them see that English poetry does not have to be difficult, but can be enjoyable and fun. I also hope that using these poems will help you to improve your students' English in a number of important ways.

By listening to these poems being read well, your students will develop a feel for the stressed-based rhythms and sound patterns of English. This is because these poems have a noticeable metre (a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables) as well as a distinct rhyme-scheme. By helping them to develop this feel for the sounds of English you are also helping them to be able to speak English with appropriate intonation.

Most of the words in these poems, especially the earlier ones, are not too difficult, and are the kind of words your students need to learn in school. They can be used therefore, to reinforce and recycle vocabulary, as well as other language items, in an enjoyable way and in an enjoyable context.

By using these poems you will be exposing your students to a special way of using words, or a special kind of language, which is not very often found in textbooks, but which should be an important part of your students' language diet. This kind of language is literary language. It is to be found in children's literature such as stories, poems and plays, and is imaginative, not only in content, but also often in form, especially in poetry. It is an important kind of language to use with your students because it is very likely to invite an oral or written response, especially if it describes feelings, emotions and experiences to which the students can relate, as in many of these poems.

Therefore, your students may be stimulated to respond to these poems by writing a similar poem of their own. Moreover, since many of the poems have a distinct 'repetitive language framework', you can help them to write their own poem by first composing a 'class poem' on the board using the same framework as the poem chosen, but eliciting different words and ideas from the students.

I hope therefore, you will find these poems useful. I especially hope, however, that you and your students will find them enjoyable.

Yours sincerely,

Mike Murphy

PS I do not object to copies being made by Hong Kong teachers who wish to use these poems as teaching material.

Mike Murphy's Hong Kong poems