Short Poems Are Scary!

What do whales sing about? Invite your class to imagine the thoughts of whales before writing acrostic poems on the topic. The plan blends together a bit of life science with plenty of opportunities for creativity and writing.

Can you create a poem without writing a word! With found poetry, you can! Practice one version of found poetry with a lesson on book spine poems. Learners create poems by stacking books and reading the lines created by their spine titles.

Second graders write a poem using words from a list and practice poetic forms. In this instructional activity on writing a peace poem, 2nd graders brainstorm words or phrases associated with "peace." Students choose a poetic form to...

A repetition poem is the focus of a lesson that challenges scholars to compose an original piece. To add meaning to their poem, authors choose words to repeat at the start of most lines.  

Scholars scour thematically aligned texts to gather a bank of words they can use in an original acrostic poem. 

Scholars take part in two exercises to boost their knowledge of personification. After reading a detailed description and excerpts from famous poems, writers list action verbs and objects then combine words to create a humorous...

Budding poets compose an original free verse poem. Encouraged to use personification and alliteration, scholars read over three tips and examples then try their hand at drafting a poem of their own style.  

What can happen if you eat too much cafeteria food? Or wear dirty clothes every day? Or talk back to your mother? Use a lesson on humorous poems as a way for students to practice silly rhymes as fictional epitaphs.

Young scholars write rhyming poems using rebus. With pictures instead of words, authors create original work about things they love. 

If you like poetry, wait till you try backward poetry! Young writers read Shel Silverstein's "Backward Bill" before writing their own funny poems that are full of backward imagery and phrasing.