Use Poems to Teach Elementary Kids Language Arts
How to Teach Rhyme Patterns, Homophones and Connotation with Poetry
Apr 10, 2009
What’s The Weather Inside? by New York Times bestselling author Karma Wilson [McElderry, 2009] is a collection of over 120 short, silly poems for kids. Wilson’s funny and thoughtful poems cover a wide range of topics including rhyming, homophones, and connotation.
Elementary teachers can use What’s the Weather Inside? to teach students language arts lessons. The poems in the collection are great for reading aloud to elementary school kids ages 6–10 and are appropriate for kids ages 9–12 to read independently.
Teach Poetry Rhyme Patterns to Elementary Kids
Elementary students need to be able to identify and write poems with different types of rhyming patterns. Teachers can gain students’ attention and interest by sharing funny poems from What’s the Weather Inside? to show the kids examples of rhyming patterns.
Word Play, What Your Dog Might Be Thinking, and Mother’s Day are all examples of poems written in rhyming couplets or an AABB rhyme pattern and the poem Sass is written in an ABCB pattern. The language arts teacher reads the one of the poems aloud to the students and writes it on the front board.
The students use different color markers to circle the rhyming word pairs at the end of each line. The teacher then verbally prompts the students to identify the rhyming pattern and labels it on the board. This same procedure can be repeated with other poems.
Teach Homophones to Elementary Kids
Elementary teachers can use the Sunday/sundae word pair in the short poem Sunday’s Sundaes by Karma Wilson to teach homophones to students. The rhyming poem is about a young girl’s declaration that if she were queen that everyone would only eat ice cream sundaes on Sundays.
The teacher reads the poem to the class to introduce the topic of homophones. The teacher explains what homophones are and asks the students to brainstorm other homophone pairs such as red and read or pear and pair. The teacher then reads the poem What the New Gnu Knew by Karma Wilson. The students demonstrate their understanding of homophones by identifying the homophones in the poem. The class then writes their own poem using a homophone pair.
Teach Word Connotation to Elementary Kids
Connotation is the feeling that a word evokes in a reader. Elementary students learn that words can have positive and negative connotations. Teachers can use Karma Wilson’s A List of Lovely Words and A List of Ugly words to teach the language arts concept of connotation to students.
The teacher reads A List of Lovely Words to the class. The students talk about what kids of feelings the words in the poem have – if they sound happy, sad, or mean. The teacher will then read the poem A List of Ugly Words and discuss the types of feelings the words in that poem have. The teacher will explain the vocabulary word connotation to the students and discuss how good writers use words with different connotations while writing.
Teachers can use poetry to teach kids language arts lessons. What’s The Weather Inside? by Karma Wilson contains short poems that elementary teachers can use to teach poetry rhyming patterns, homophones and word connotation.
For more information on Karma Wilson’s What’s The Weather Inside? read: What's The Weather Inside Poetry Book.
For more elementary language arts lessons read: How to Teach Nouns to Elementary Students and Write ABC, Haiku, Quatrain and Concrete Poems.
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