ABSTRACT
Children's poetic features and structures functioned as essential scaffolds for their writing; moreover, children organized and appropriated content for a single poem from across varied textual material and voices they encountered in and out of school. Research supports the sociocultural nature of children's poetry writing, and the subtle and complex borrowing that occurs in children's poetry. Educators may give child poets only generic encouragement, and children may become desensitized to that encouragement, never experiencing the revelation of knowing what an audience thinks about their work. Ultimately, the author's view is that teachers should never grade their children's poems, but they can become skilled at offering supportive feedback and occasional judgments about that poetry. Children feel deflated when there is no mention of the spirit of the poem, so this is where to begin. Then, adults might focus more on what children's poems are doing well.
