April is National Poetry Month. Poems in Spanish are a wonderful way for children to hear the rhythm and sounds of the language. Spanish language learners can read and listen to poems and with support they can also write their own. Here are a few ways to share poetry in Spanish with children during National Poetry Month.
Check out our resource page with more Spanish poems for kids and poetry activities.
17 Ideas for Sharing Poems in Spanish
1. Watch videos of animated poems in Spanish or children reciting poems on YouTube by searching poemas infantiles. Here are a few to get you started:
Aquel caracol
El invierno
La largartija
2. Explore El Jardín de Douglas and chose an illustrated poem to share with children. Douglas Wright is a well-known poet from Argentina. El Jardín de Douglas is his blog of poetry and art for children.
3. Teach counting-out rhymes, also called choosing rhymes. They are short poems in Spanish with rhyme and rhythm, and kids can use them as they play. Here are a dozen of our favorite Spanish Choosing Rhymes for Learning Language.
4. Have kids choose 5 to 10 related pictures and write a word or two about each. Glue the pictures around the poem.
5. Do activities with rhyming words. There are online games here and you can do these activities with printable rhyming picture cards.
6. April 18th is “poem-in-your-pocket day”. Help children choose a poem to carry with them on April 18th to share with others. Here are some short printable poems for beginners. This is a wonderful way to speak Spanish!
7. Enter text or lyrics from a song and make a word cloud with Wordle or Tagxedo.
8. Kids can illustrate poems in Spanish with their drawings or with pictures they cut out.
9. Write about your city, school or family using the structure of the That’s so Miami (Eso es Miami) project. That’s so Miami asks for a poem, up to 100 words, in English or in Spanish, that contains the line That’s so Miami. Many of the entries are in both Spanish and English. Here are the text entries, but you can filter by audio too (use the bar at the top of the page). You do not have to live in Miami to appreciate how clever they are. Many are appropriate for children (although not all) and the idea can be applied to any place.
10. Explore children’s poems by famous Spanish-language poets. You can find a printable page and activities for Amado Nervo’s poem La ardilla here. Or try Los pollitos by Olegario Victor Andrade. There is a printable version with reading comprehension questions.
11. Add movement to poems in Spanish or act them out. These short poems get kids moving.
12. Readwritethink suggests taking kids on a poetry walk (suggestion 3 in their great list of tips on how to help kids write a poem).
13. Kids can write a theme poem on paper shaped like the subject of the poem, or they can use the interactive tool for writing theme poems here.
14. Share short poems in Spanish from the book Costal de Versos y Refranes from the Biblioteca Digital (Mexico). In particular, poems like Paloma blanca and Colores y más colores work well with Spanish language learners.
15. Teach El rap de las parejas based on the poem Las parejas by Gloria Fuertes. The video is below and the song is available on iTunes. There is a vocabulary activity on this website. You can also find the poem and activities on this slideshare.
16. Introduce students to other poems by Gloria Fuertes. There are several included in this slideshare and here you will find other activities using Gloria Fuertes poems.
17. Listen to poems by Amado Nervo, Pedro Villar and other poets that have been set to music by Antonio Selfa.
