National Poetry Month is an April perennial. If you’re once again rushing to pull together some poetry lessons – or perhaps feeling a little guilty because you’ve put poetry aside in favor of more high-stakes ELA topics – take a quick look at these seven engaging resources.
AND – If you LOVE to teach poetry and always do, we’re betting you can find a fresh, fun activity here to add to your collection.
✻ Poetry Writing Made Fun: 10 Cool Teaching Ideas
Over the years Cheryl Mizerny has crafted poetry experiences that her students really enjoy. Her reading and writing ideas enable kids to understand poems without dreading the annual “poetry unit” she herself disliked as a tween. She shares 10 of her favorites, including the Book Stack Poem (shared below).
✻ Novels in Verse! The Why, Which and How
Novels in verse offer quicker reads with instant character connections, vivid imagery, pathways to complex issues, strong narratives, and much more. ELA teacher Kasey Short shares how to use them in class and introduces lots of titles for your middle graders.
✻ Ideas to Integrate Poetry Throughout the Year
Megan Kelly always intends to integrate poetry across her units, but somehow ends up scrambling each year as National Poetry Month approaches. This fall she has a list of activities to hold herself accountable. Try some of her ideas in your own ELA, history, science or math classes.
Kids analyze “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” with focus on diction.
✻ 6 Poetry Activities You Can Use All Year
Whether your classes dive into poetry in April or throughout the year, teacher Megan Kelly has lots of activities to enrich your students’ experience. Her latest unit has kids collaborating on visual analysis, horoscope haiku, matching teachers to their poems, and more.
✻ Invite Your Students to Peel Some Poems
Ramp up poetry positivity with the Peel the Fruit activity from Project Zero. Throughout the year NBCT Kathie Palmieri helps her fifth graders uncover layers of poetry understanding and then invites them to write their own. Their current favorite: the Intimate Object Poem.
✻ What Changes Kids’ Minds about Poetry?
To guide middle grades students into paying more attention to poetry and reconsidering their often negative attitudes about reading and writing poems author and teacher Linda Rief suggests kids create heart books, do quickwrites and illustrate lines of their own work.
✻ Celebrate Poetry Month with 5 Fun Activities
Teaching poetry can give students a sense of connection, collaboration, and creativity as they express themselves and read the expressions of others. During National Poetry Month, teacher-author Marilyn Pryle shares fun activities from her classroom that touch on all three.
✻ Teaching Students That Poetry Is a Necessity
Dina Strasser finds more poets are writing about climate change and other social justice issues. Such poems can provide alternatives to middle schoolers when the themes aren’t too entangled in complex structures. She suggests some poetry options students can “hook into easily.”
✻ Teach Social & Emotional Skills through Poetry
When students learn to identify and name the ideas and emotions in poetry and share their own emotions through writing poems, they better understand their feelings and build empathy and understanding for others. Teacher leader Kasey Short shares methods and lots of poems.
✻ Making Room for Poetry in ‘Standards Based’ Classes
How often do you share poetry with students? Reading interventionist and literacy coach Gwen Flaskamp shows how increasing students’ experience with poetry can build literacy, analytical and social-emotional skills and help meet state learning standards.
