Top 3 Reasons Why Poetry Is Going To Improve Your English (Tremendously!)

Top 3 Reasons Why Poetry Is Going To Improve Your English (Tremendously!)

Hello, everyone! I am Ms Nuri, an English Teacher at Lil’ but Mighty.

When I was 9 years old, my English teacher told me that to get better in the English Language, I have to love what I read and write what I love!

She was fond of giving us writing exercises which involve writing diary entries and book reports. However, I found these challenging because I got bored easily and ran out of ideas quickly.

Seeing how I struggled with writing compositions and even short writing activities, she introduced me to poetry. It was then my love of writing began, and I hope yours will too!

Many people think that poetry can be difficult and boring. I am going to share with you a few that I enjoy and the top three reasons why reading and writing poetry is going to help improve your English tremendously!

1. The right poem motivates you to practise reading and writing.

One of my favourite poets, while I was growing up, is Ken Nesbitt. He writes poems about anything and everything. You can, too!

Poetry should be personal and relatable to you. Here is a poem about a student who misses being in school:

His poems are fun to read because they rhyme and are about topics that we all can relate to. Hopefully, by sharing this poem, I have piqued your interest and leave you wanting to read more! If your answer is a loud, resounding ‘yes’ then visit poetry4kids.com for more of such humorous poems. Who knows, you too might be inspired to write a poem about being in a Zoom class!

If you struggle with reading passages aloud, poetry is a good place to start practising. It is more fun and an easier practice for you to work on your fluency. This is because poems are written with a specific number of syllables to make the reading experience more pleasant than reading a normal paragraph.

It is certainly simpler and more fun than reading a paragraph, right? You can select a few of your favourite poems to read aloud to your friends and family members. This way, you can practise reading something you love and get honest feedback about your reading skills at the same time!

2. Writing poems expands your vocabulary, naturally!

The next best thing about rhyming poems is the number of new words you will learn along the way.

When you try to find a rhyming word, it immediately encourages your mind to explore the use of many different words. When you are not able to find one, you can always turn to rhyme dictionaries like rhymer.com.

In my journey to find rhyming words, I learnt so many new ones!

Try it. What rhymes with ‘write’? Jot down as many words as you can and then discover more words along the way!

3. Less is more – test multiple skills at once!

Writing one verse of poetry (typically four lines) challenges you more than writing one whole paragraph of a composition!

It tests your subject-verb agreement, grammar, and vocabulary skills. All the while, taking less time and having more fun!

Let me show you what I mean. Here is a poem about falling down:

In the above poem, Kenn Nesbitt practised different sentence types, using different connectors, such as ‘and’, ‘so’ and ‘or’. He also explored the use of different verbs, and made sure he used the right tenses and modal verbs! Notice that the last stanza talks about the present? Hence, he has shifted to use the present tense while the previous stanzas were all written using the past tense.

Can you write a poem about falling down, too? It can be silly like slipping on some peanut butter and jelly, then falling down on your belly! 🙂

There you have it! I hope you had fun reading this and are inspired to begin writing your very first poem.

Poetry is the start of when I fell in love with reading and writing, and I wish the same for you, too.

Have you written some poems of your own or come across those that you enjoy? Share with us in the comments section below!