Maintains that teachers' use of classroom poetry provides opportunities for children to respond to ideas, feelings, and events. Examples illustrate how poetry offers readers/listeners invitations to participate: invitations to identify with others, gain new perspectives, retell stories, move with the sound of language, and respond to one's own…

Maintains that, for each child, an initial contact with a poem through a sensitive and skillful teacher can be an individual dialogue with thought and feeling, reforming and deepening with time. Examples of poems are used to illustrate this point. (BB)