Concrete Biopoems

As part of their reading of The Hobbit, readers create a biopoem for one of Tolkien's characters.

How well do your learners really know the characters in Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising? A biopoem activity prompts readers to investigate the characters and their traits. Line by line, writers add the characters' relatives,...

To gain a better understanding of characters in Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, kids create a biopoem for one of her characters.

The biopoem is a great way for instructors to get to know class members, classmates to get to know each other, and readers to flesh out their understanding of a character. Why not create a biopoem for a character from Oedipus the King? 

Explore characters in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer through biopoems. Pupils follow the specific formatting presented here to write 11-line poems about characters in the novel.

Readers of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale demonstrate their understanding of the play by selecting a character and crafting a bio poem that reveals his or her fears and aspirations.

What better way to get to know a character than through a biopoem? Learners choose a character from Chaim Potok's The Chosen and create a well-crafted poem about his or her desires, traits, and ambitions.

“Words can be like x-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything.” Readers of Brave New World will be pierced by an activity that asks them to use details from the text to craft a biopoem for one of the characters in Aldous...

Numerous people from China immigrated to the US during the era of industrialization and expansion. Provide your class with a glimpse into the life of a Chinese immigrant through the poetry they left behind. They then compose a poem of...

Introduce your class to ekphrastic poetry with an exercise that asks them to examine Edward Hooper's painting House by the Railroad and Edward Hirsch's poem "Edward Hopper and the House By the Railroad." After a close reading of the two...