"Poetry Without the Pencil" Guest Post by Author Kate Hosford

Zora, Second Grade

For this POETRY BOOST post, I'm thrilled to hand the reins over to fellow children's author and poet Kate Hosford. Kate is the award-winning author of several picture books and poetry collections. Kate's books are packed with poetic devices and magical language, which make them great mentor texts! I'm especially excited for Kate's upcoming book,  You and I Are Stars and Night, and enchanting bedtime adventure between caregiver and child, which releases February 3, 2026. 

In today's post, Kate shares some ideas for "serious play" with poetry . . .

A couple years ago, I taught poetry in an after-school program at a public elementary school in Brooklyn. The school was excellent, and the students had already been introduced to poetry by various teachers. However, there were some specific challenges. First, it was a mixed age group, 7-11 years old, with a diverse set of learning styles. I had some students who had already done a day of school and an hour of tutoring by the time they came to me. In short, I had under an hour to grab their attention and keep it. As the term progressed, I saw that some of the students were eager to play with words but had trouble with writing mechanics or were simply tired after a long school day. Near the end of the term, I switched gears and turned to set of exercises which I refer to as “poetry without the pencil.” 

 The first was magnetic poetry. I gave each student a bag of word magnets and asked them to make poems on magnetic surfaces. First, with a larger number of words then with a decreasingly smaller number of words. The students were also able to trade words if they wanted. Here are two examples from one student: 

Endira, fifth grade 

 It’s fun to take this to an extreme. What can you create with five words, or three words? Which words are you willing to trade and which do you absolutely want to keep? 

Another activity was blackout poetry, where all words in the student’s poem are blacked out, or ignored, except for those that they want to keep in the poem. The poem must also use the words in the order that they appear. Here is an example of the text one student used and the resulting poem (rewritten here for clarity.)

 Four normal proud people. 

 Mysterious big moustache 

 of small boy. 

 Lena, fifth grade 

 These first two exercises both have the feeling of a treasure hunt, where the students are searching for those nuggets worth using in their poems. For blackout poetry, the goal is to no longer see the words as a page in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, but instead, simply as a collection of words. Additionally, the constraint of having to use the words in the order they appear provides another fun challenge that is not present in the magnetic poetry exercise. 

 The third exercise, and perhaps my personal favorite, was collage poetry. I provided each student with collage materials and word sheets that were divided into parts of speech and gave each of them a notebook. I also showed them an example that I had done myself: 

Here are some of the collage poems they made: 

 Clay, Third Grade 

Zora, Second Grade 

 John, fourth grade 

 As the students focused on finding words and pictures, then cutting, arranging and pasting them, striking images appeared in their written and visual language. The poems seem to almost write themselves. Clay, a boy with ADHD, was suddenly able to focus. Kamal, who had a hard time with the mechanics of writing, was now excited to cut, paste, and integrate his poem and his artwork. Zora, a second grader, approached this task with the purpose and intensity of a much older student. Soon, we couldn’t stop making notebooks. 

 Another advantage of poetry without the pencil is that once the students are focused on the parameters of the tasks at hand, they are also freed from the pressure of writing the perfect poem. Instead, they are delighted to play with language—a delight that is matched by the intensity and seriousness with which they approached these challenges. I am neither a psychologist nor a neuroscientist, but for certain students, I imagine that once the brain is focused on the mechanics and rules of an exercise, the subconscious bubbles to the surface and language and imagery that they use becomes more interesting. In short, once students are in this state of serious play, good things start to happen. 

I encourage anyone who is teaching poetry to try a few of these exercises and let me know whether your students like them!   -Kate Hosford