Establishing the reading writing connection with poetry.

As a young student, I had difficulties in understand poetry. I always used to guess what exactly it was that the writer meant in his poems. When poems for writers such as Shakespeare were used, I was at an even bigger loss because I had difficulties in just understanding what the language that was used actually meant. I found these articles on the reading writing connect and poetry to be very interesting and should really help me on teaching practice. Using techniques that I am already familiar with such as KWL or learning about that that I am not so sure about such as word work and chick and chunk really give me ideas on how I make can continue to develop the reading writing connection which is applying what they read to how they write even during lessons on poetry. The article even goes a bit further to provide me with a list of ways that I can introduce poetry to the students. I think this will be extremely useful in introducing my students to poetry. This is a far cry from how I was taught poetry at school when I just had to read a poem and answer the questions that the teachers asked about the poem or which followed beneath the poem. I can defiantly see myself using some of these methods to change the view of poetry as being boring and complicated in my classroom to being fun and interesting. These new ideas allow me to make what even I thought was a dull topic to be taught into one where I can foster the growth of the reading writing connection and at the same time allowing me to keep my students motivated. ultimately , I believe that these techniques will allow my students to become better readers of poetry and increase their ability to write poetry as well.