As a teacher, I loved teaching literacy. Since childhood, it always made more sense to me than numbers. But there was one area of literacy I never felt confident in. Poetry. It was a hurdle to overcome every year. That is until I started heading outside. Suddenly it was not only the children who were inspired.
Over the winter glaciers
I see the summer glow,
And through the wild-piled snowdrift
The warm rosebuds below.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature, in and of itself, is poetic. Any style of poetry you choose will be a good fit for outdoor learning. Here are four of my favourites.
The Mesostic Poem
A mesostic is a poem or other text arranged so that a vertical phrase intersects lines of horizontal text. It is similar to an acrostic, but with the vertical phrase intersecting somewhere in the midst of the line, as opposed to the beginning of each line.
This can easily be adapted to focus on whatever your literacy focus is, from similes to adjectives and more. For different ages/ abilities you can look at drawing the line or creating a verse based upon it.
I see…
I hear…
I smell…
I feel…
I think…
Acrostic
An acrostic poem is a poem in which certain letters of each line spells out a word, name, or phrase when read vertically. With younger children I would use simple words for each line, but older children the letter can be the start of a line
Towering majestically
Reaching for the Sky
Earthlings protectors
Eating up our dirty air
So we can all survive
Haiku
This is a traditional Japanese poem focused on nature. Haiku is composed of only 3 lines. There are no more than 17 syllables. Typically, every first line of Haiku has 5 syllables, the second line has 7 syllables, and the third has 5 syllables.
“The Old Pond”
An old silent pond
A frog jumps into the pond –
Splash! Silence again.
by Matsuo Bashō
Fibonacci
This poem also focuses on syllables, but instead follows the Fibonacci sequence – 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13
The first line has one syllable, the second has one, the third two and so on.
1 Trees
1 in
2 the woods
3 standing tall
5 waving their green leaves
8 catching and filtering sunlight
by Juliet Robertson
