In countryside schools across Shandong and Yunnan, teachers take students outdoors for special poetry lessons. Kids write poems in cornfields and rice fields, listening to insects and smelling fresh plants. They write about growth, parents and spring with warm and simple words.
Two teachers, Yang Zhanguo and Yang Deli, teach poetry in their villages. Yang Zhanguo believes all kids are natural poets, for they have rich imagination and true feelings. Yang Deli runs a poetry club, and students join for different reasons. Some write for fun, others share their feelings.
Both teachers got training from a poetry education group. After the training, they designed lessons around the four seasons and held classes outside classrooms. Fields, rivers and trees are their classrooms. They plant and harvest crops with students, letting kids turn real life into poems. Country kids get lots of inspiration from nature to write poems.
Poetry changes shy children greatly. A quiet girl improved her grades and became confident after her poems were published. Shy students relax and dare (敢于) to speak up in open-air classes.
