Poetry for Kids

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...