Poetry for Kids

It might be a little late in the year for picnics in the park, at least where I live. With the days getting colder and the leaves falling, eating lunch outside starts to sound less inviting. Still, I thought it would be fun to imagine one last picnic before winter. All you need is a blanket, some tasty food, and a little cooperation from the weather. Unfortunately, in this poem, the weather isn’t...

Autumn is definitely here! The days are getting colder, it’s starting to rain more often where I live, and we’ve had some pretty windy days lately. When I go out in the rain, I usually wear a hat to keep the raindrops off my face and glasses. Of course, when it’s windy too, that creates another problem. Sometimes I have to hold onto my hat to keep it from blowing away. It’s hard to enjoy a walk wh...

With Halloween just around the corner, I decided it was time to write a new Halloween poem. Or maybe a monster poem. But then I thought, why not write both? Of course, there are plenty of poems about monsters being scary, chasing people, or lurking in dark places. But I wanted to do something a little different. I started wondering what monsters might do for fun when they’re not busy frightening e...

When I was a kid, I had lots of toys, including toy cars, trucks, and airplanes. I loved imagining that they could go on incredible adventures, racing down highways, flying through the clouds, or speeding away from bad guys in daring escapes. I also had quite a few pets growing up. Over the years, my family had cats and dogs, a parakeet, an aquarium full of fish, and even a snake! But there’s one...

I only recently discovered just how popular squishy toys have become. These soft, stretchy, squeezable toys come in all kinds of shapes, sizes, and colors, including cute animals, funny faces, and even pretend food. Kids love to squeeze them, stretch them, squish them, and watch them slowly return to their original shapes. They’re fun to play with, and squeezing them can even help some people rela...

Halloween is coming up soon, so this year I decided to write several different pumpkin poems. Out of all of them, this one quickly became one of my favorites. One of the fun things about visiting a pumpkin patch is seeing how many different kinds of pumpkins there are. Some are tall, some are short, some are wide, some are skinny, and some have funny stems or unusual colors and stripes. When every...

Football season has just begun, and some members of my family are already enthusiastically watching the games and hoping their favorite team will make it to the Super Bowl again this year. I’ve written lots of sports poems over the years, including a couple about football. But those poems could just as easily have been about soccer as American football. This is the first poem I’ve written that is...

I wrote this poem because, here in the northern hemisphere, summer is almost over and fall will be here in just a few days. But, at least where I live, you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the weather. The days are still sunny and warm, and it still feels a lot like summer, even though I know the cooler autumn weather will be arriving before long. That got me thinking about what might happen if S...

My wife recently started a new job as a school picture day photographer. Every day when she comes home, she has interesting, and often funny stories about the people and things she photographed that day. She’s taken pictures of hundreds of students, of course, but she’s also photographed teachers, school staff, and even a principal’s dog! One thing she quickly discovered is that the grown-ups aren...

The beginning of a new school year can be exciting, but it can also be a little scary. You might wonder who you’ll sit with, whether you’ll make new friends, or whether the other kids will think you’re cool. That was one of the ideas that got me started on this poem. The other idea has been bouncing around in my head for years. Once, during an assembly at an elementary school, I was speaking to ab...

Sometimes magazines ask me to write poems on a specific topic. Earlier this year, an editor at Storyworks 4-6, a multi-genre magazine for students in grades 4–6, asked me to write a poem about being nervous about making new friends on the first day of school. Instead of writing just one poem, I did what I usually do and wrote several different ideas so the editor would have a few to choose from. I...

Celebrate the upcoming release of The Greatest Book of Poetry Ever Written by Kenn Nesbitt ! In this special episode, Kenn shares the story behind his biggest poetry collection yet… a “greatest hits” volume featuring 120 of his favorite poems from across his career, including 18 poems appearing in print for the very first time. Learn why this book is especially meaningful to Kenn...

When I’m writing a poem, I often know how it’s going to end long before I know how it’s will begin. It’s a little like taking a road trip. You don’t usually hop in the car and start driving without a destination in mind. First, you decide where you want to go. Then you figure out how to get there. You might take a wrong turn or two along the way, but if you keep your destination in sight, you’ll e...

When I was a kid, it seems like I was always getting in trouble with my parents for misbehaving. The funny thing is, I usually didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. I was just having fun. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to kick the newly planted flowers in the garden or chew on the edge of the dining room table. Somehow, though, my parents always disagreed. Those childhood memories were the ins...

I wrote this poem because I’m due for a haircut next week, and I have reached that awkward stage where my hair feels just a little too long. It’s not quite wild enough to be a problem, but it’s long enough that I find myself looking forward to my appointment and wishing it would get here sooner. At the same time, summer has finally arrived. After months of cool, rainy weather, the idea of spending...

Usually, the poems I write begin with some oddball idea that pops into my head, a dragon with problems, a monster Thanksgiving dinner, or a kid with a backpack full of strange surprises. But sometimes I write poems for magazines and classrooms with a particular theme or occasion in mind. That’s exactly how today’s poem came about. Next month marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declar...

As the school year comes to an end, lots of kids are counting down the days until summer vacation. There’s something exciting about the last few weeks of school: turning in your books, cleaning out your desk, and looking forward to sunny days, sleeping in, and all the fun that summer brings. But the end of the school year can also feel a little bittersweet. Along with saying goodbye to homework an...

When I was a kid, I loved books where somebody discovered a hidden world in a place where it absolutely shouldn’t exist. Stories like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Phantom Tollbooth, and later Gregor the Overlander all begin with something ordinary—a rabbit hole, a whirlwind, a tollbooth, a laundry-room grate—that suddenly opens into someplace strange, mysteriou...

Mother’s Day is always celebrated on the second Sunday in May, and since I usually post new poems on my website on Mondays, I started wondering what kind of poem would make sense to share the day after Mother’s Day. That’s when the title “Mother’s Day Disaster” popped into my head. The idea of everything going hilariously wrong on Mom’s special day made me laugh right away, so I knew I had to writ...

Most of the poems I write start with ideas I come up with on my own. But I also regularly write poems for magazines, textbooks, and even standardized tests for schools, where I’m given a specific assignment to work from. I wrote this poem at the request of my editor at Scholastic Storyworks 1, a multi-genre magazine for first grade. She was putting together an issue focused on phonological awarene...

Every once in a while, I find myself coming back to one of my favorite kinds of poems to write. I especially enjoy creating characters who are terrible at the one thing they are supposed to be good at. There is something inherently funny about that idea. Over the years, I have written poems like “The Pirate of Pickletown,” “Lorenzo Liszt, Non-Scientist,” and “Steve the Superhero,” all featuring ch...

Some poems begin with a big idea, and others start with something small and simple. This one began when I was out for a walk on a beautiful day. The weather was just right—not too hot, not too cold—and everything felt bright and cheerful. Without even thinking about it, I realized I had a little extra bounce in my step. That expression, “a spring in my step,” has always made me smile. It’s such a...

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved poems and stories that build on themselves—ones where each new line adds something to what came before. You might know stories like “ The House That Jack Built ” or “ There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly .” They’re fun because you can almost predict what’s coming next, and sometimes you can even join in as they go along. I’ve always wanted to write a poem li...

Most of the time, when I write a poem, the idea sneaks up on me. It might come from something I see, something I hear, or just a silly thought that pops into my head and refuses to leave. But every now and then, I get a very specific assignment. That’s what happened with this poem. An editor at Storyworks 4–6, a magazine for students in grades four through six, asked me to write about a kid who tr...