A Thoughtful Approach to Teaching Poetry

Awakening the Heart: Teaching Poetry K–8. Second Edition
By Georgia Heard
(Heinemann, 2024 – Learn more)

Reviewed by Jeny Randall

About ten years ago, a co-teacher and dear friend gave me a copy of Georgia Heard’s heart mapping activity. My students were struggling with generating ideas for writing, and the exercise provided a format to brainstorm moments, places, hobbies, people, and other things that were important to them.

In addition to giving them a lot to write about, the activity also helped me get to know each of my students better. For years, I intended to seek out the source and see what other treasures Heard had to offer, so when I encountered the second edition of Awakening the Heart, I dove in.

Whether you are looking for ways to incorporate poetry into your existing curriculum or create a stand-alone poetry unit, Awakening the Heart is a treasure chest of activities, projects, mentor texts, and teaching strategies to support your work. Drawing on twenty-five years of experience in teaching and writing poetry, Heard helps readers to see “the world with a poet’s eyes and a poet’s heart” (p. xvi).

As Heard explains, “the world has changed drastically since the first edition” (p. xvii). In the second edition, Heard has reworked poetry centers as poetry stations and created activities that are accessible for students K-8 (and in some cases through high school). In addition, she provides new activities and many updated resources, including recently published poems. Although I have not read the first edition, it seems that Heard has rewritten portions of her book rather than simply updating it.

Awakening the Heart is an impassioned and thoughtful plea for folding “poetry into the nooks and crannies of the school day” (p. 32) as well as intentionally creating space for it in the literacy curriculum. Heard illustrates ways to establish a classroom environment in which poetry is abundant, and students feel seen and valued by having their perspectives and experiences represented.

Creating a Poetry Unit with Heard’s Guidance

Using Heard’s approach, I created a new poetry unit for my eighth-grade class. During the first week, students “marinated” (p. 27) in poetry. They listened to, read, and selected poems. I sought to follow Heard’s guidance in choosing poems that affirm “each student’s humanity, intelligence, and sense of belonging” (p. 28). Her prompts for responding to poetry sparked insights and observations that deepened both students’ understanding of the poems and their own compositions.

With strong mentor poems as their guides, students wrote poems that were playful, poignant, insightful, and vivid. Students shared work at first reluctantly and then with greater confidence. Over time, I suspect that creating a space for students to read their poems also supports students in feeling safe taking risks in their learning more broadly.

After marinating in and writing poetry, we turned to elements of craft. Heard uses the analogy of a poet’s toolbox. She defines and gives examples of craft moves such as anaphora, personification, consonance, and enjambment to add both rigor and sophistication to student work. In addition, the thirteen poetry prompts in the final section of the book were invaluable in our poetry unit.

If you were introduced to poetry through a study of analysis and craft or are not yet comfortable discussing or responding to poetry, Heard offers strategies for reading poems aloud and for sharing your experience of a poem that help make teaching poetry accessible for all teachers. She also instructs teachers in modeling these steps for students.

In Awakening the Heart, Heard offers concrete suggestions and examples from classrooms in which she has worked to help readers envision how to make poetry come to life in their space. For example, she provides ideas for authentic assessment and ways for your poetry study to spill out into the hallways and other parts of school, such as organizing a poetry walk (like a story walk). She provides tips on conferring with students and protocol for sharing poems. Other tips are more specific, such as supporting students to use the thesaurus to find “more accurate, specific, and vivid words” rather than merely “sophisticated or long words” (p. 116).

Folding Poetry into Your Day

If teaching a full poetry unit isn’t possible, Awakening the Heart offers strategies to fold poems into corners of your day – did you finish two minutes early? Use that time to share a poem. To facilitate this, Heard provides a table with kinds of poems and specific examples of poems that can be used throughout the day: poems for attendance, brain breaks, weather, math, and special events (p. 34).

Other activities, including heart mapping or creating a personal anthology, fit into literacy units and help build community. Poetry stations around the room extend learning throughout the year and offer exposure to different aspects of poetry within a literacy block.

Heard also explores ways to integrate poetry into content areas or project-based learning. For example, writing an apostrophe poem during a plant unit in science (p. 173) or writing a poem for two voices in social studies to display differing perspectives regarding a historical event (p.178).

Awakening the Heart is not a collection of pre-crafted lesson plans. As reading poetry does, reading and absorbing this thoughtful approach to teaching poetry and the curated activities took time. The slower approach will make this book a go-to for vacation reading and will, perhaps, inspire you to write some poetry along the way. Whether you teach kindergarten, high school English, or middle school science, I trust you will find the same inspiration I did from Awakening the Heart.

An educator for twenty years, Jeny Randall currently serves as the middle school director and language arts teacher at Saratoga Independent School in Upstate New York. Jeny is a Responsive Classroom certified teacher who reviews regularly for MiddleWeb. School breaks find Jeny headed into the wilderness with her family and a good book.