This week, the 1-2 continued poetry writing by taking some more time and thought about how they arrange the lines of their poems on a page. A line break in poetry is where a poet chooses to end one line and start another. Line breaks help establish the rhythm of a poem and can create a variety of effects. Line breaks can help highlight certain features of a poem, such as rhyme. They can also increase the pace of a poem, or slow a poem down. Line breaks also create tall, "skyscraper" pieces of writing which make the genre distinct from prose.
For our line break exercise, we gave each student a strip of paper with all the words of a poem called "Crickets" on one line. The kids then read the words over several times and decided where the line breaks should be. They marked these places with pencil lines and then cut and glued them down on the page in that formation.
Some kids looked at where the punctuation was (commas and periods were obvious clues), other kids read aloud and tried to listen for the places where their voices naturally paused, another technique was to try to put the same number of words on each line, and finally, a few gave thought to the meaning of the words in the poem to help inform their decision (i.e., many kids thought to give the word "alone" its own line as both the final word in the poem and the fact that it would then be alone.
We shared the different ways the kids broke their lines and arranged them on the page to both see the difference and hear the different way each one sounded when read aloud. The final step was "the big reveal" when we showed the line breaks that this poet, Valerie Worth, had made in her poem. She had drawn her inspiration from the rhythm of the chirping sounds of crickets in nature.
Enjoy the pictures below of the kids at work as well as the finished pieces. Ask your child to point out theirs and read it together.
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