More Than Rhymes: Rediscovering Poetry in the Young Learner Classroom

By Alan McGuire

Before grammar is ever corrected in the classroom, language is used by children to make friends, play games, tell stories, and to imagine make-believe worlds.

Poetry sits in a deeply human space. Across cultures poems, songs, chants, and rhymes have been used to mark births, mourn losses, pass down legends, express love, pray, protest injustice, and entertain children and adults. Poetic forms differ across languages, yet the desire to play with language rhythmically and creatively is universal. Poetry reminds us that language is not only a method for exchanging information but a way of sharing an experience and emotions.

In the young learner classroom, and arguably in all classrooms, this matters more than ever in a time of exams and AI. Children have an innate love of rhythm, repetition, humour, and imaginative language. Before ever studying poetry as a literary genre (and arguably killing off any fun they might get out of it), children encounter poetry in the form of nursery rhymes, picture books, skipping rope chants, football songs, advert slogans, radio jingles, and playground-modified versions of popular songs. Playing with these familiar forms, teachers are able to bring poetry into the classroom and help learners connect with English on a more meaningful and human level.

Why Poetry Works

Poetry supports many of the core aims of language teaching and involves all four skills.

One of poetry’s greatest strengths is its rhythm

English is a stress-timed language, and learners often find word stress, sentence stress, and connected speech difficult to master through explanation alone, even more so if their language is not stress-timed. Poems, chants, and rhymes allow children to feel and play with these patterns through repetition. Learners can start to internalise the rhythm of English, while also developing pronunciation and intonation in a memorable way.

Children need repeated exposure to new vocabulary and structures

A short poem or chant allows learners to revisit the same language again and again without losing interest. Heads, shoulders, knees, and toes is a classic example. Rhythm, rhyme, and repetition makes vocabulary learning a game, helping words move from short-term into long-term memory.

Poetry encourages risk-taking

Many classroom tasks are binary with the students either having the correct answer or not, which can make some learners adopt a win or fail mentality. Poetry shifts the focus. Instead of asking if the language is right or wrong, we can begin asking what else we should add. There is room for imagination, humour, and personal expression.

Poetry supports more than linguistic development. It promotes confidence and curiosity while offering a safe space to play with language.

Poetry in the Age of AI

Recent innovations in artificial intelligence have made many teachers reevaluate what is important in language classrooms. AI can generate grammatically accurate texts, suggest vocabulary, and summarise information. It can even generate poems in seconds. But the point of including poetry in the classroom is not necessarily to produce the next generation of Dickinsons or Whitmans. The process is the thing – teaching our students how to find joy in language, the beauty of ideas placed next to each other, the humour that comes from an unexpected rhyme. I’ll always remember when doing a sense poem for Mother’s Day, one child said that his mother sounded like someone on a podcast! These moments build confidence and remind us that language is a social activity.

Even in their first language, children are still learning how to use language, and more importantly when and why we use it. They learn that language can comfort, amuse, persuade, bring people together – and force us apart.

Bringing Poetry into the Classroom

One of the advantages of using poetry with young learners is that it doesn’t require an English literature degree. Poetry activities can be prepared in minutes and adapted to many topics or language points. The aim is not to produce amazing poems, but to use the opportunity for meaningful language use and creative practice.

Here are three activities that have worked particularly well in my own classes.

1. Sense Poems

Seasonal topics such as Christmas, Halloween, spring or the summer holidays lend themselves perfectly to sensory poetry.

Using the prompt I can see…, I can hear…, I can smell…, I can taste… and I can feel…, learners build a simple poem describing an occasion or place. I feel… I see… I hear … can also be used, and using the same one multiple times is also possible.

For example:

I can see bright lights.
I can hear people singing.
I can smell hot chocolate.
I can taste gingerbread.
I can feel warm by the fire.

The activity practises the target language of the senses while encouraging learners to name related objects and to lean towards describing situations. With younger classes it is better as a group activity by eliciting examples from students. They can then take it in turns to perform their poems.

With older groups, I often get students to perform the poem without telling the others the situation or the title, which then turns the poetry performance into an interactive game where the rest of the class has to guess what the poem is about.

2. “I Like… But I Don’t Like…” Chants

This is one of the easiest ways to introduce rhythm into the classroom.

Using almost any vocabulary set, learners complete a repeated pattern such as:

I like apples but I don’t like bananas!
I like strawberries but I don’t like melons!

or

I like swimming. I like basketball.
I like football. I like riding my bike to school…
But I don’t like cleaning my room!

If you have split your class into groups for this, you can then give each group in turn the responsibility to teach – and then lead – the others through the chant. You can encourage playing with different rhythms, speeds, and actions. The repetition reinforces key vocabulary while performance builds confidence and gives even the quieter learners a chance to speak English aloud.

3. Tongue Twisters

“She sells sea shells on the sea shore.”

“Big pink baby pigs play basketball by the beach.”

Not poetry, but there’s definitely poetry hiding in there. A class classic that can be modified to the class’s needs.

Many of us will have used tongue twisters in our lessons, and your students will likely already know a few – but the fun really begins when you teach your students how to make them for themselves.

The secret to a good tongue twister is to look for a pair of phonetic elements, like /sh/ and /s/ that makes ‘She sells sea shells…’ so effective. Elicit some examples of each phoneme, and then build an example sentence.

I like running a kind of ‘Got Talent’ game show at the end of this activity – the students demonstrate their tongue twisters to the class, or get the rest of the class to try to say it quickly and clearly, and the rest of the class – or three judges, if you prefer – vote on who does it best.

Performance

There are two components to the perfect delivery of a poem: pronunciation, and memorisation.

When your students have produced a poem or a chant, explore how they can use their knowledge of pronunciation to make the delivery more effective. Is there a surprise waiting at the end of the poem? Teach them the dramatic pause before landing the surprise. Is there something scary in the middle of the poem? Teach them to speak quietly as they go through those lines.

But a poem read with eyes glued to the paper will never be as compelling as a poem read from memory. In the age of technology and AI, our students’ ability to memorise details, facts, anything, is being severely compromised. Getting them to learn even a two-line poem off by heart will bring enormous benefits, especially if you make a habit of asking for it.

Conclusion

By bringing poetry back into our classrooms, we are doing more than teaching rhyme or rhythm. We are creating opportunities for learners to experience language as it has always been: creative, collaborative, and profoundly human.

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