This year, I decided to try something a little different in my school hallway. I put up a bulletin board and called it The Poetry Corner. It started with a fairly simple idea. I wanted my students to read more English around the hallways during their breaks.
Not because I wanted to force another piece of literature down their throats, not because I wanted them to analyse metaphors or identify poetic devices, and definitely not because I thought they were suddenly going to become passionate readers of 300-page novels. I just wanted them to stop for a moment and read a few lines.
Most of my students rarely read anything longer than a social media post. Their attention is constantly being pulled in a hundred different directions, and I wanted to find a form of literature that could meet them where they were. Poetry seemed perfect for that. It is short. It can be emotional. It can be funny, strange, beautiful or painfully relatable. And sometimes, four lines are more than enough to make you feel something.
So I started posting small poems on the board, ranging from A1 to B2 level, carefully choosing texts that my students could actually understand and enjoy. I wanted them to discover that reading in English did not always have to mean sitting down with a long text and struggling through every sentence.
They loved it. And then I had an idea. I told them that if they wanted to, they could write their own poems and put them on the board. At first, they were shy. Very shy. The first poems were often anonymous. A few lines, sometimes accompanied by a little drawing, quietly pinned to the board without a name attached. It was almost as if the children wanted to say something but did not quite feel ready to stand behind it yet. And I completely understood. Writing something personal and putting it where everyone can read it requires a surprising amount of courage.
But then something started to change…
The poems became longer.
Then more elaborate.
Then more personal.
The vocabulary became more ambitious. The ideas became more interesting. Some students started experimenting with rhyme, others with imagery, others simply with putting feelings into words. Some took their inspiration from film lines or songs lyrics and built something amazing around those! And, perhaps most importantly, they started coming to me during breaks. “Teacher, can you please check this before I put it up?” That sentence became one of my favourite things to hear. They would hand me their poems, sometimes nervously, and ask me to proofread them. We would correct a verb, change a word, fix a spelling mistake or find a better way of expressing an idea. And then they would pin the poem to the board. With their name on it! That little detail mattered so muh to me, especially since knowing them all so well, I knew how much of a struggle that might have been for many of them…as it would have been for me at their age, to be fair.
At the beginning of the year, I had students who were reluctant to let anyone see their writing. By the end of the school year, I had poems from my 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th graders covering the board and it was so amusing to keep moving the poems around in order to fit more and more of them.
In fact, by the end, I had to take down some of my own poems* from the very first days of the board because there simply wasn’t enough space anymore. And honestly? I couldn’t have been happier about it. Because somewhere down the road during this ending school year, The Poetry Corner stopped being my bulletin board. It became theirs, from their thoughts to their own names.
I think this is where poetry does something particularly beautiful for a child’s self-esteem. When we ask children to write, we often focus on whether they are doing it correctly. Is the grammar right? Is the vocabulary appropriate? Is the spelling correct? Does the answer match the model? All of those things matter, of course. I am an English teacher, so I would be lying if I said they didn’t. But creative writing gives children something else. It gives them that amazing feeling of ”this belongs to me, I did that all by myself!”
There is no single correct poem if I am to be entirely honest. There is no answer key, no cheat sheet. There is simply your idea, your voice and your way of putting something into the world.
And when that thing is then displayed on a school wall for other people to read, something cool happens: a child gets to see evidence of their own ability. ”My name is up there, I was part of this” can be a very powerful sentence for a child who is used to thinking that they are “bad at English”, “not creative”, “not good at writing” or simply not as talented as somebody else.
I saw some of my shyest students slowly become more willing to participate. I saw children who initially hid behind anonymity eventually put their names on their work. I saw them take pride in finding a better word, creating a better line or simply seeing their poem sitting there among everyone else’s.
And one of them hasn’t stopped. Even now, during the summer holiday, she has been sending me poems and asking for feedback. At this point, I may have a future poet growing up under my nose. And I absolutely love that.
The moral of the story, at least for me, is that children need little doses of literature and art far more than we sometimes realise. They need opportunities to create something that isn’t graded.
They need spaces where being imaginative is not “extra”. They need to discover that their minds are capable of producing things that did not exist five minutes ago. Games are fun. TikTok is fun. Social media is fun. I am certainly not interested in pretending that we can simply remove all of these things from children’s lives. But children have an enormous amount of creativity hiding inside them, and sometimes they simply need someone to open the door. Sometimes that door is a poem. Sometimes it is a drawing, a story, a song or a silly little paragraph written during a break. And sometimes, all it takes is a bulletin board in a school hallway and a teacher saying:
”If you want to, you can put yours here too.”
So yes, The Poetry Corner is staying. Next school year, I fully expect to lose even more wall space. And I couldn’t be more excited about it.