ABSTRACT
The instructional approach honored Marilyn Chapman's recommendations that genre study consider elementary children's "engagement, inquiry, exploration, personal connections and meaning-making, participation in a discourse community, apprenticeship and mentoring, collaboration, and talk about text". In addition to viewing poetry as a genre, and following Brian Street's view of literacy as a social practice, the author viewed poetry writing as a practice, one influenced over time by particular tools and events in particular social spaces. This chapter describes the elements of poetry sessions: reading poetry, writing poetry, performing poetry and so on. The poetry writing part of the session could be characterized as a hybrid between inviting students to write from a broad prompt or inviting them to write on any topic. Though the act of reading a poem publicly can be exhilarating, juggling these multiple acts for an audience may add to the demands on children, placing them in a vulnerable position.
