POETRY KS1 - 

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What are poems?

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Key Stage 1 (KS1) poetry, intended for children aged 5-7, focuses on introducing young learners to the enjoyment of language through simple, engaging poems. This stage emphasizes accessibility, rhythm, and rhyme, often with themes relatable to children, like animals, nature, or everyday experiences. Activities like reciting, acting out, and creative responses to poems help build confidence and language skills. ​

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Your poem can be about anything - a thought, an emotion or a story.  Look through my poetry index and you'll see what I mean.  Having worked with KS1 children, I was quickly informed that they loved poems with rhyme, metre and especially poems that tell stories, or paint a picture with words and both poems that are funny but also poems which carry their thoughts with description and meaning.

 

 Poems can rhyme, use alliteration or rhythm but they don't have to.  Children (and many adults such as myself too) love rhyme and also metre in their poetry.  It makes it stand quite apart from prose and gives it a special place in the literary world.  It can easily be the making of a song when music is added to it.  Look at the last poems in my list of poems for younger children.  You'll see that these poems have been turned into songs and I'll bet your children will love to sing to these poems.

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Go through the other articles which I've written and you'll find much to help you with the teaching and understanding of poetry but giving your class five minutes a day with a poem, to break up other subjects and for relaxation, to me is one of the best things you can do.  My parents used to read me poems when I was a child and I didn't need 'teaching' to quickly understand the lovely difference between poetry and prose.  Without any instruction about writing poetry, I wrote my one and only poem for many many years when I was 11 - for  the school magazine, and it has been published by an educational publisher in  2010:  MY GARDEN   Read it to your class​​