I used to ask my kids to do poetry declamation but it has fallen by the wayside in the “too much to do” category. But over recent months some of us have been talking about the value of speech output and how much to ask for in class, etc. I am a big proponent of voluntary speech output, but not of forced output, which in my opinion should rarely if ever be done in a classroom.
So I was thinking about how, before I heard about TPRS, my students would memorize a poem and love it. We would work on it in class and I would coach them along some declamation guidelines and it was really fun to hear them, especially when they entered into a competition at a local university. I’ve got those declamation guidelines (what to tell kids about reciting poetry) somewhere and will try to get them added to the posters page when I find them. They are pretty much a complete guide to how to coach kids in declamation.
Below is a link to some of the best poems my kids used to memorize. They are carefully collected to be simple, yet with high octane content. Those of us needing a break from stories and R and D may want to explore this form of output. It is always received well by high achieving kids and their parents because it creates the illusion that the kids know a lot more language than they actually do. And the kids, when adults, always have a poem to show off their “French” with.
Maybe we can get a list of simple, beautiful poems in other languages somehow, and put them up on the TPRS Resources link of this site.
Here are the poems I have in French:
https://benslavic.com/Posters/french-poetry.pdf