Improve your young poets' descriptive writing with this lesson on personification. A SMART board and PowerPoint presentation guide your class through the process of identifying human qualities attributed to various non-human objects. A...

Give your emerging poets a topic (or have them choose one themselves), and have them play with different poetic devices. They work on alliteration, rhyme, metaphor, personification, simile and onomatopoeia. Consider having them choose...

Oh the joys of love! As a special Valentine's Day assignment, budding authors research the life of one of the most romantic poets, Keats. They read the letter, "To Fanny Brawne, 13 October 1819," then compose a love letter of their own....

Poems carved into the wooden walls of the Asian immigrant prisons on Angel Island provide upper elementary graders an opportunity to study not only the story behind the poems but to also focus on the figurative language employed by the...

Quoth the raven - nevermore! Delve into Edgar Allan Poe's' The Raven," but not too deeply. Answer reading comprehension questions in this multiple-choice quiz without getting too much into the mind of the narrator or poet himself.

A very good 13-slide presentation on similes and metaphors is here for you. It introduces young poets to each term, gives examples, and prompts them to work together to identify similes and metaphors in several different sentences.

If your class doesn't know what a haiku is, show them two examples from the Japanese poet Issa (both included here), and have them make some observations. How long are they? What is the structure? A video and a list of questions help...

Metaphors open doors to descriptive language for your poets. They read the poem "What is the Sun" and record all the metaphors they find. Then, scholars change one of them to a simile. After answering two more comprehension...

What do Roger Chillingworth, Dr. Heidegger, and Ethan Brand have in common? They are all American literature poster boys for Romanticism, advertising the dangers of valuing reason over feeling and intuition. Introduce your class to...

What makes a poem a poem? Give your class a basic understanding of some of the different aspects of poetry by showing them a slide show of poetic devices and elements. The presentation is quite long, so you might split it up into a few...

In a detailed, creative writing task, potential poets analyze how race, identity, and society categorize and (mis)represent us. The learning begins with an imaginative anticipatory set where high schoolers describe unique situations...

A delightful lesson on poetry is here for you and your middle schoolers. Learners are instructed to write a Halloween poem. They get to choose the age range for the audience of the poem. So, it may be scary (for older kids), or humorous...

Construct from a canvas of words, lyrical expressions that your budding poets can share and post.  Based on refrigerator magnet poetry, creative writers can develop their poetry independently, or from a given prompt from their...

Sor Juana, considered one of the first feminist writers and a great Latin American poet, is the topic and inspiration for this excellent lesson. Use the introduction, guiding questions, and learning objectives to lead your class into a...

The sixth in a series of poetry writing exercises asks young poets to craft a free verse poem.

Young poets research an animal and use the information they gather to craft and illustrate a cinquain.

Discover alliteration found in picture books by Pamela Duncan Edwards. Then, dive into a read aloud of Alligators All Around by Maurice Sendak. This practice sets the stage for budding poets to create their own acrostic poem,...

A poet's word choice can be the difference between a poem that is merely sad, and a poem full of heartbreaking regret. Middle schoolers discern the tone in four different poems, noting the relevant textual evidence that supports...

Alliteration and imagery are two vital parts of any well-written poem. Encourage your young poets to include these devices with a set of activities designed to get them thinking, writing, and creating.

Be mine! Young poets use the provided worksheet to craft a Valentine's Day acrostic poem for the word heart.

Poetry comes in all shapes and sizes. Young writers pick a shape, select words and phrases that describe how the shape makes them feel, and create a shape poem. A raindrop example and step-by-step instructions give your...

Young poets are asked to craft a poem in the voice of a first person narrator, a dramatic monologue of sorts, that reveals not only a dramatic situation but something of the narrator's character as well.

Identifying onomatopoeia is one thing; making an inference about the significance of the sound is more advanced. Young poets read a literary passage and identify the examples of onomatopoeia in each before naming the...

Drip drop goes the raindrop. Quack quack goes the duck. What other words have sounds? Reinforce the concept of onomatopoeia in a worksheet in which young poets identify animal sounds and items that make a given sound.