Write a Secret Sentence Poem

What You Need:

• Paper
• Regular pencil
• Colored pencils

What You Do:

1. Have your child brainstorm ideas for a sentence that has words that they think they can include in a poem. For example, they may come up with a sentence of “I love to write poetry.”
2. Next they will write a poem where each line of the poem contains some of the words in the “I love to write poetry” sentence. For example, one line of the poem may have “I,” the next line “love,” and so on. Two words from the sentence can appear in the same line, but the sentence words should appear in the poem in the same order in which they appear in the sentence.
3. Have your child pick a colored pencil to make the “secret sentence” words a different color within the poem. They can trace over the “secret sentence” words in that different color, for example with a green colored pencil.
4. Your child can use the other colored pencils to draw a picture to accompany the poem.
5. Finally, have them read the poem aloud, always an important part of the poetry process!

If they enjoyed writing this “secret sentence” poem, let them come up with more sentence ideas and write some more poems. You can even use it to write secret messages within a short story or a paragraph.