Back to School Activity – Short Poems for Kids

Reading poems, books and a wide variety of relatable texts can offer great comfort to children, which makes pulling out a short poem 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 children provide pupils 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 the summer break. 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 Morning Meeting  Activity

1. Read Back to School Today!, and discuss how the character in the poem feels.
2. Draw out from your discussion that the character feels a mix of emotions and that these feelings change over time.
3. Encourage pupils to recall how they felt when they woke up that morning.
4. Model how to complete the sentence — “When I woke up this morning, I felt…”
5. Give pupils thinking time to plan their response.
6. Encourage pupils to take turns to complete the sentence verbally.
7. Provide pupils with a pass option if they do not wish to share.