A Case Study on Young Children’s Experiences and Exploration of Poetry

Adopting the approach of intrinsic case study, this inquiry documented how a class of 29 young children, aged 3 to 5, experienced and explored poems in teacher-led poetry reading activities. Across one year, they explored 15 books of poetry and 29 short poems. The research identified four primary stages in these activities. Stage one, Connecting: from life to poetry. Stage two, Overall Experiencing: intertextual connection, reading aloud, preliminary discovery, and being aware of poetic forms. Stage three, Detailed Exploration: entailing deeper understanding, representation, application association, and improvisation. Stage four, Suggesting Future Exploration: from poetry to life. The wonderful and open-ended questions of the two teachers helped the children understand the contents of the poems. The teachers also timely guided the children in recognizing the forms of the poems. The use of nimble body movements to represent metaphors and actions in the poems, along with frequent improvisation, were key features of this class’s poetry exploration. This approach successfully forged a connection between the immediate, sensuous world and the symbolic, represented worlds for children. Additionaly, the study demonstrated that poems served as a mediator between young children’s lives and their learning. In the process of experiencing and exploring poems, these young children were able to “perceive, feel and think” more deeply, more delicately, and from broader perspectives. The aesthetic reading approach, adopted by the teachers, enabled the children to enjoy the pleasures of delving into both the content and forms of poems, and to use novel metaphors to express the ideographic flavors of poetry reading.