Writing Poetry for Kids. It's harder than you think.

Poetry for children

Writing poetry for children is something most editors – and even other writers – tell you NOT to do.

Editors aren’t looking for poetry, they warn.

Children’s poetry is too difficult to write, they exhort.

They’re right. It IS difficult to write.

Yet so many of us try. Why? Because it’s fun, because ultimately, children love it (the poetry section of Inkless Tales is one of the hardest hit) and because when it’s done right, it’s delightful. Poetry is necessary to our souls.

There are several reasons why this is so. For one reason, many of us feel it must rhyme. This is not true. There are many very good children’s poems that do not rhyme. For those of us who want to teach children to write their own poems, one excellent form of non-rhyming poetry to begin with is the haiku.

This three-line form, which follows a strict form of five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line, and five syllables in the last line, concentrates on evoking a description, or a moment. It’s a beautiful exercise.

Oddly enough, the strictness of its form can release enormous creativity in children. I find it works much better than the typical acrostic poems that many teachers work with.

Another type of non-rhyming poem teachers and other educators (parents, try this at home – poetry is meant to be used!) may wish to try is what’s commonly called a “sense poem” – try choosing a subject and describing it, line by line, via the senses.

Here’s one I’ll throw off the top of my head for an example, about my dog, Tucker:


Black like the board at school
Soft like the lining of my coat
His bark is sharp, sharp, sharp
He sits if he sees a hot dog
And he fills the house and my heart
With the smell of wet dog
When it rains.

(You can tell here that I’m pretty crazy about my dog, a German Shepherd/Lab mix we adopted from the pound.)

So you see there is more than one way to write a poem than to rhyme it.

But what gets people in trouble, generally, is the rhyming – and not so much the rhyming.

People can rhyme.

What they can’t seem to manage to “get” is the meter.

That’s where it all seems to go horribly wrong for them. And what editors, readers, and their friends who say – “Oh, it’s so great” can’t seem to explain. Because what happens so many times is these writers are READING their poem to their friends, and they can unconsciously correct the problematic meter while reading the poem aloud.

More on this in the next post. But I’ll tell you then how I teach kids meter – and they get it when adults sometimes can’t.