Encouraging Students to Use Line Breaks

love is – line breaks

Originally uploaded by teachergal

One of my students experimented with other genres this week, one of which was poetry. She wrote a gorgeous poem about what love is in her notebook. At first, I thought, What does a nine year-old know about love? But then, after reading it a few times, I started to think, She knows what she wants for herself when she grows up and that’s more than okay. I particularly love the last few lines of her poem, which are in the image to the right. It reflects the “circle of life;” the life cycle most of us hope for…

I wondered “What’s next?” for this young writer as I read her notebook today. She dug deep and wrote with voice. I didn’t want to mess-up her poem by telling her to add more details. So, after looking at all of the poems she wrote in her notebook, I noticed that she did not use line breaks in a purposeful way. In fact, she used very few line breaks in her poem. (Kudos to her for making poetry that didn’t rhyme!) Hence, I decided to break up my favorite of all of the poems she wrote into something with line breaks. I don’t know if she’ll like it, but I figured it might help her to see one of her own poems revised with line breaks seeing as my kids look at lots of poetry as it is (e.g., during Poetry Friday Shares and for fluency lessons in Reading Workshop). I’m hoping this strategy will work and will lead to her writing more poetry in her notebook, but now with line breaks.