Day 21 of April Poem A Day!!!

The prompt for today brought me back to my tutoring experience and working with students who needed help in Reading. Many times they had missed something and when they learned it they did better. This is a poem about a boy with whom I worked for a year before he improved in Reading.

April 21, 2014
Prompt: Write a poem about going Back to Basics

His Need

When he read for me I knew
the skips and the falters
the omissions of words
his whole demeanor as he
pored over the words
his eyes scrunched with
frustration as he missed
more and more

I knew he needed to
start over and relearn
all that had somehow
slipped over him as he
struggled engulfed
with sadness to make sense
of a foreign world each time
he saw a new task

He needed to go back
to before he saw words
so I showed him diagrams
and matching picture to
picture in an attempt to
fill in the blanks of a child
whose lack of ability
probably stemmed from
his loss of understanding
somewhere along the way

He needed the basics of
recognizing shapes to read
words and soon he was reading
those words and soon he was
reading paragraphs and soon
he no longer needed me.

copyright 2014 by Barbara Ehrentreu

Until the next time, again thank you to all who are tweeting and retweeting about this blog. I am very honored you are doing this.:) I am writing these for my own reasons, but it is nice to know someone else is enjoying them too.:)