The Stealth Approach: Geography and Poetry

This article examines the ways in which the poetry strand of literacy instruction can help teachers infuse geography into the elementary classroom. Teachers can use poems to target important aspects of reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. When the poems contain substantive geography content, teachers can “sneak” geography mini-lessons into discussions of vocabulary or reading comprehension, for example. As they teach children about the language play of poetry and as the children reread poems to develop fluency, teachers can keep core geography concepts central to the children's attention. This article discusses how various poems with geography content contribute to each component of literacy instruction.