It’s poetry month, and that means it’s time for me to share as many creative poetry activities, poetry projects, and poetry workshops as I can muster over here!
Today, I’m going to walk you through a toolkit of creative poetry options for your ELA classroom.
We’ll start with one of my favorite introductory activities for any poetry unit, poetry collage, and then go full steam ahead through poetry one-pagers, blackout poetry, great performances and verse texts, I am From poems, a colorful poetry annotation activity, and more!
Creative Poetry Activity: Poetry Collage
One fun way to introduce students to modern poetic voices (in writing) is through Billy Collins’ poetry curation at The Library of Congress, Poetry 180.
For the poetry collage activity, students explore the Poetry 180 site (or any poetry site or collection of your choice), discover poets and poems they find meaningful, and create a collage of their favorite lines with their own artwork or art they find online.
Start by sharing the collection you’ll be using with students.
Next, invite them to search out titles that intrigue them and start reading poems. They’re searching for original language and lines that appeal to them. I suggest you have them choose and write down 6 lines (also writing down the authors and titles for a list of sources they’ll create later).
Now comes the fun part – the remix. They can take their six lines and re-order them or break them up however they wish on a piece of paper, Google Slide, or Canva doc, along with complementary imagery. They can create original art, drop in art from the internet (adding sources to their list), or use Canva graphics (as in the models above).
By the end of the period, hopefully everyone will have explored a range of contemporary poetry, started to think about what draws them to certain kinds of language, and experimented with how to use visuals to highlight meaning in language. For me, that’s a great start for a poetry unit!
Poetry Analysis Activity: Poetry One-Pager
Poetry one-pagers can work with any poem (performance or written). You can also use them for a time period like The Harlem Renaissance or a collection of poems.
As with any one-pager, providing a template option helps take the artistic guesswork out of things for students who are art-wary. Invite students to map different parts of their analysis to different places in the template, incorporating visuals along the way.
For example, you might ask students to represent the central theme of a poem in the center, using both words and visual imagery. Or you might ask them to fill a frame around the page with examples of sensory imagery in the poem. Or use a corner to showcase a meaningful symbol with both an image and a quotation.
You get the idea! You can tailor the one-pager to the poem, or have a standard set of directions you can apply to any poem. Here’s my version on TPT if you’d like the done-for-you option.
Poetry Workshop: Blackout Poetry
Blackout poetry is such a solid poetry workshop option, especially for students feeling hesitant to try writing poetry. Students simply search out intriguing words on a page of text, move them onto another page and consider how to connect them into a poem (often diving back in and hunting for words like “and” and “it”), then move into blacking out and adding imagery.
In recent years, I’ve gotten into creating blackout poetry digitally, in which case you can screenshot any text and avoid the need for finding old pages.
Whichever you choose, I’ve got you covered with my guide to creating blackout poetry online or off. Grab the free kit here.
Explore Jason Reynolds’ Ain’t Burned All the Bright
Jason Reynold’s collaboration with Jason Griffin, Ain’t Burned all the Bright, is unlike any other book I’ve seen. It’s a four-line poem spread out across a beautiful series of images to create a book students can read in less than an hour.
Consider highlighting it with a First Chapter Friday, Book Trailer Tuesday, or deep dive day in class. It’s short and AMAZING.
Study a Verse Novel: Long Way Down
There are so many incredible verse novels out there now, there’s really no need to pick a favorite. I loved Starfish, The Crossover, and Alone for middle school, but for high school, my top pick would be another Jason Reynolds (yeah, I know you’re not surprised) – Long Way Down.
Whatever verse novel you choose, try a flash verse project with your students. I illustrated the steps for you below, or you can read all about this creative poetry activity over in this blog post.
Poetry Workshop: Drag and Drop Tiles
I’ve always liked playing around with digital “magnetic” poetry tiles, so I got pretty excited when I realized I could design my own sets on Google Slides with a little colorful help from Canva.
For this activity, students simply drag and drop their poetry tiles around the slide until they create a poem they like, deleting the tiles they don’t want.
You can create your tiles in slides, using a dark colored background and dropping in words in black type with the white highlighter on. Or you can create words in Canva like me, then drop them as images onto a slide with a fun background.
You can see how one teacher – Jennifer Harrington – remixed this project with her study of Amanda Gorman right here.
Poetry Activity: Explore Amanda Gorman’s Work, #Teachlivingpoets-Style
Speaking of Amanda Gorman, here’s a project Melissa Alter Smith (founder of Teach Living Poets), shared with me from her classroom when she came on the podcast a while back. She and her students were studying Amanda Gorman’s “A New Day’s Lyric.”
Melissa and her students began by working through the poem and annotating it with depth.
Then she wanted to give them a new way to process it creatively.
She had read from poet Kaveh Akber that he starts to see his poems as shapes and colors after he reads them over and over. So Melissa showed her students some of Akber’s poetry images and then offered them the same idea – how could they interpret Gorman’s poem through shapes and colors?
After her students created their images, Mel tweeted their work and they got positive comments back from Amanda Gorman – so thrilling for the kids!
Check out the full post with Melissa Alter Smith right here, then give this lesson a try in your classroom.
Poetry Activity: Score and Discuss Performance Pieces
One of my favorite go-tos with poetry is to teach kids about slam. The idea that judges – based only on their own personal criterion – give a poem a score from 1-10, is always pretty fascinating to explore.
I like to play performance pieces in class and then ask everyone to write down their score and a reason why they chose it, then go around and let volunteers share their opinion. When they realize that they might give a poem a 3 that someone else gave a 10, fascinating conversations come out of it.
Any time I’m running a poetry unit, I’ll probably include at least one performance poem each day and let kids score and discuss.
The Button poetry channel has a classroom-friendly playlist you can explore. Or try Rudy Francisco’s “My Honest Poem,” Harry Baker’s “Paper People,” or Sarah Kay’s “A Bird Made of Birds.” (As always, please preview videos before you play them in class, as you know your situation best).
Poetry Workshop: Write “I am From” Poems
The “I am from” poem is such an easy win. I’ve invited hundreds of students to write these poems, inspired by George Ella Lyon’s poem, “Where I’m from” (listen to the audio) or (read the text), and I’m always so impressed by the results. Students tend to surprise themselves, and I’ve had many kids choose their “I am From” poem for later class poetry slams, showcasing it as the work they’re proudest of.
Lyon weaves together vivid images from her life as a girl, drawing on little things like art projects she did, products she used, things her parents said, as well as sensory details from her life experience, to create a window into her past.
It’s a striking poem, and also an easy one to understand and to emulate (perfect for class!).
Start by guiding students to brainstorm about sensory experiences, sayings, and people from their childhoods. Then they’ll choose their favorite bits and pieces to put into the basic structure of an “I am from poem,” each verse of which goes something like this:
“I am from….
From … and …
I am from … and …..
So if a student had brainstormed imagery like this:
- raisins lined up on crunchy peanut butter celery
- my worn-out red ping pong paddle with the handle duct-taped on
- my Dad’s loud laugh
- my brother’s protection
Then a stanza might look like:
I am from the crunch of ants on a log for snack after school.
From Dad’s loud laugh and Taj’s brotherly protection.
I am from a worn out ping pong paddle with a winning record.
As students work on their imagery and their lines, it helps to guide them to go deep on individual memories, trying to add more descriptors and bring the sensory details to life. Mixing and matching images leads to unique surprises, and breaks from the standard line formatting of the prompt.
From what I can tell after years of running this workshop and also hearing from other teachers, this workshop is pretty much an automatic win.
“I am from” poems practically write themselves, celebrating the lives of their writers in powerful ways. You can find even more ideas for this workshop over in this post.
Try Annotation Illumination
If you want to go deep with a poem, consider putting kids in small groups for an activity I call annotation illumination.
You know how people used to create illuminated manuscripts? These stunning versions of a text brought so much richness to the words. For this project, students will try illuminating a text themselves, in their own modern way (no need to get out the mortar and pestle and start powdering gold leaf for the paint).
To have your students illuminate a text, think about what annotation skills you’d like them to try out. Things might feel checklisty for a minute here, but every student will put their own unique spin on the project, and everyone will learn from what everyone else does too.
You might ask students to identify literary devices, highlight themes, experiment with sketchnotes and visuals, use color coordination to bring clarity to their viewer, define tricky words, and ask questions.
You can let them work in Google slides, a digital program like Canva, or on a large sheet of paper with some artistic materials available.
As they work to create a visual illumination of a poem, they’ll have a chance to see just how much their own understanding of the piece improves as they go over and over it, trying to decide what’s most important to illuminate. They’ll experiment with different ways to showcase what they’re discovering, increasing their annotation toolkit for the future. And then, when they share their work with each other with a gallery walk, they’ll have a chance to see what they like best about each other’s annotations, and borrow ideas for their own future work.
By the end of the project, hopefully they will better understand how annotation helps them understand a text better and remember it more, AND have some new strategies ready to use for more informal annotation.
