Students explore poetry. In this literature lesson, students examine music and lyrics by Natalie Merchant in order to make the transition to analyzing poetry by Keats and Wordsworth.

Students replace nouns, verbs, pronouns, and adjectives in a poem. They identify the parts of speech, and rewrite the poem using their own selection of parts of speech.

Students create found poems to represent characters in Twelfth Night. In this Shakespeare lesson, students discuss how to compose found poems and select characters from the play to write their poems about. 

Third graders read a book about emigrating to America. They create and illustrate a triante poem using sensory words, depicting something they liked about the story.

Students identify and analyze the poetic devices of alliteration, metaphors, onomatopoeia, personification, rhyme, and similes. They identify examples of each poetic device in songs, complete a worksheet, and teach the devices to a...

Students create haiku poems. In this poetry lesson, students listen to the sound of the ocean from an audio file and write a haiku poem about oceans.

Students examine how the epic poem, "Ramayana" teaches dharma, one of Hinduism's most important tenets. They read the abridged version of the "Ramayana," identify the main plot points, complete a chart, and write an essay on a moral...

Students construct a four-line poem to be used on the inside of a Valentine's Day card. They use a digital camera to show themselves to their "buddies" (local nursing home patients) who receive the cards on Valentine's Day.

Young scholars examine the emotion of anger through the poem 'A Poison Tree'. In this poetry analysis lesson, students identify and decode unfamiliar vocabulary they encounter, engage in groups discussions and complete several...

If you are teaching a unit on Robert Frost's poetry, you might consider this quiz. These 10 questions require identifying missing words from lines of poems and demonstrating understanding of several different poems including "Oven Bird,"...

Students examine Haiku poems and analyze their meanings. They create a whole class Haiku, then develop their own poems.

How can you tell if someone is happy? The lesson works with elementary and middle school scholars to activate their schema and pay attention to details to make inferences in their daily lives, poetry, and other literature. Cleverly...

Middle schoolers complete a unit of lessons that explore the poetic voice of Langston Hughes. They define voice, read and analyze various poems by Langston Hughes, and complete journal entries for each instructional activity.

This teaching guide for Love That Dog and Hate That Cat includes suggestions for how to integrate Sharon Creech's books into a poetry unit, as well as writing activities, discussion questions, and tips for making poetry...

Is The Iliad part of your curriculum? Check out a resource that offers something for those new to teaching the classic and those with lots of experience using Homer's epic. Plot summaries, discussion questions, activities abound in...

Readers take the main characters in Matilda and individually describe them through a mnemonic. To get there, group members create an acrostic poem describing the character they were given, and choose one of the words from the...

Your class can participate in a writing program involving four building blocks. By exploring words, sentences, writing forms, and story organization, they improve their creative writing skills throughout this year-long unit. Early in the...

Students use different qualities of movement to express themselves. In this lesson plan on movement, students use different qualities of energy and then use their experience as an inspiration for writing poetry.

Winnie the Pooh lands in a gorse-bush plant in chapter one of A.A. Milne's beloved children's novel, Winnie-the-Pooh. With the novel study, scholars research three interesting facts about the plant. They also compose a four-line poem...

Third graders read "Seedfolks" and "What a Garden Can Teach Us" and discuss how a garden is like a community. They create a class quilt illustrating how their classroom community the lines of the poem.

Students use visualization techniques when reading poetry.  In this visualization and poetry lesson, students work in groups to present a tableau that depicts a word from the poem as classmates guess the word.  Students then...

Students consider the role of rhythm and meter in poetry. In this integrated arts lesson, students discuss the attributes of poetry and use their music skills to set picture book poetry to music by creating "singable" poems.