Poetry-Friendly Classroom, Clip #7

Encourage the children to keep a poetry notebook. Suggest that they can write down any words or phrases that strike them as odd, interesting, difficult, amazing, puzzling, scary etc.

If they have an idea for any interesting ways of saying things, jot them down. If they come across a phrase, a verse, a line from anything they've read anywhere - poetry, the newspaper, street sign, anything - jot it down.

Write out poems or parts of poems in the notebook too. To help them, you can make a 'public' notebook that is up on the wall in the classroom, where you can write things that you've noticed.