Use this short poem for kids when students return to school. This child-friendly poem discusses feelings that they may experience when heading back to school after an extended break.
Ease back-to-school jitters and launch your students into a love of poetry with a short poem for kids written just for the first day of school!
Short Poems for Kids
Reading poems, books and a wide variety of relatable texts can offer great comfort to kids, which makes pulling out a short poem for kids a perfect activity for the first week of school.
While going back to school is such an exciting time for many children, it can also be a time of trepidation and uncertainty. It’s vital that we take the time to acknowledge these feelings and do our best to ease anxiety in children.
Fortunately, poems for kids provide students a chance to make connections including text-to-text, text-to-self and text-to-world, offering a chance for important social and emotional learning in the classroom.
This particular poem follows the emotional journey of a young child who is returning to school after a prolonged absence. The child is feeling excited and nervous at the same time. They have many questions about what the return to the classroom might be like.
Share this poem with your class to stimulate a discussion about how they might be feeling about returning to school.
Suggested Circle Time Activity
- Read Back to School Today!, and discuss how the character in the poem feels.
- Draw out from your discussion that the character feels a mix of emotions, and that these feelings change over time.
- Encourage students to recall how they felt when they woke up that morning.
- Model how to complete the sentence — “When I woke up this morning I felt…”
- Give students thinking time to plan their response.
- Encourage students to take it in turns to complete the sentence verbally.
- Provide students with a pass option if they do not wish to share.
For students who find it hard to verbalise their feelings, use our Emoji Themed Self-Assessment Desk Cards that are perfect for circle time.
At the end of your discussion, thank your students for sharing. Reassure your students their feelings are normal and that they are not alone.
This is great: thank you. I will use it as a shared reading, then we will in daily writing, use it as a stimulus for the children to write and illustrate how they feel about their return to school. I'll the publish and display their work, around the enlarged poem, on the wall.
Hi Juley, Thank you so much for your kind feedback! We hope the poem helps ease the transition for students and teachers alike.
Love this! I am going to have it ready and waiting for my students' return on Monday. Thank you so much.
Hi there Ruth. Thank you so much for taking the time to send us this positive feedback. As the author of the poem, it means a great deal to me to hear about how this resource is going to be used in classrooms. I hope your students enjoy the poem and that it can stimulate some great discussion about how they are feeling about returning to school. Have a wonderful day!