Poetry for Community: Cultivating Identity and Belonging in the Writing Workshop

The Context: During our August back-to-school meetings, I challenged my fellow teachers to use the first writing unit of the year to foster community and validate student identities in our classrooms. In my opinion, our second grade had it the easiest because their first unit included poetry. Yes, I said poetry. Stay with me! If you’re like many teachers, you may find teaching poetry daunting or formulaic. But poetry is a great way to build community because there are no rules when writing free verse poetry.

Here’s Why: Free verse poems can be short, the structure is open-ended, and punctuation is optional. This allows all students to feel successful and develop a sense of belonging as authors, regardless of their current writing and language skills. Furthermore, as students write and share poems about topics that really matter to them, we learn more about each other. We discover what students have in common and what makes them unique in our classroom community, strengthening their sense of belonging and showing that we value all of their identities.

How It Works: On the first day of poetry writing, we immersed students in poetry and asked them what they noticed. We charted these observations to refer to in future lessons.

On the second day, we taught students that poets write about topics that are really important to them. When we write about something we feel really strongly about, then we can put all of those feelings into our writing so that our reader feels them, too. This lesson sets students up to write the type of poems that show off their identities and build community.

After that, our minilessons featured poems that highlighted different aspects of poetry we wanted students to learn about and try out, like repetition, white space, rhythm, descriptive language, etc. In addition to the mentor poems, we modeled writing a poem or engaged the class in writing a poem together before sending students off to write poems of their own. At the end of every workshop, students shared their poems with partners, in small groups, or with the whole class.

Of note: The most important part of building community through poetry is the share at the end of the workshop. Without the share, students won’t learn what is unique about their classmates or find things they have in common with each other. The share is when connections are made, individuality is celebrated, and bonds are strengthened. Here are some examples of poems students wrote and shared with their class.

Go Deeper: I first learned how to teach free verse poetry from Regie Routman’s four book series Kids’ Poems that was published in 2000. Each book is focused on a different grade (kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd grade, and 3rd-4th grade), and the simple format works just as well in 2026 as it did when I began teaching 20 years ago. The books are available on Amazon, or check out this short article by Regie Routman for a quick overview: “Kid’s Poems: How to Introduce Poetry Into the Elementary School Classroom”