30 Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month in the Classroom
- Invite your students to email letters to award-winning poets as part of this year’s Dear Poet project.
- Learn more about the educator resources on Poets.org with this brief video guide featuring Richard Blanco.
- Begin each day or class period with a new poem.
- Find your local state, county, or city poet laureate, or find out how you can create a local poet laureate position.
- Talk to your school librarian about creating a reading list of poetry books.
- Send your students on a scavenger hunt for favorite poems in the Poems for Kids section of Poets.org.
- Ask your students to choose a poem to read aloud to their families.
- Organize a reading of your students reading original or favorite poems out loud.
- Ask each student to create an anthology of their favorite poems.
- Show your students these poets’ definitions of the word poetry and ask them to provide their own.
- Decorate your learning environment with the National Poetry Month poster.
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Read 2021’s most-read poem by a contemporary poet, Amanda Gorman’s “In This Place (An American Lyric).”
- Explore the glossary and introduce your students to a different poetic term every day.
- Sign up for Teach This Poem to receive a weekly poem, classroom activities, and multimedia resources.
- Have your students make and send greeting cards to their family members featuring lines of poetry.
- Browse these lesson plans about ars poetica poems and assign your students to write their own.
- Ask your students to read aloud a poem from Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School.
- Have your class choose poems and write them in chalk on the sidewalk or driveway.
- Invite your students to read about ekphrastic poetry and write poems in response to their favorite pieces of art.
- Make a playlist of audio recordings of poets reading their work.
- Publish a school-wide literary journal or anthology of student poems.
- Help your students find digital events and opportunities through Poetry Near You.
- Celebrate Poem in Your Pocket Day on April 29 and ask your students to mail or email a poem to someone in their community.
- Talk about immigration and heritage in the classroom with these selections of poems and lesson plans.
- Browse this selection of poems about spring.
- Have your students illustrate poems and hang them around their homes.
- Celebrate Earth Day with this lesson plan which asks students to build a birdhouse out of reusable materials.
- Assign your students to watch and respond to a select Blaney Lecture recording.
- Challenge students to create a poetry notebook and write one poem per day.
- Download the Poetry in the Classroom Calendar and plan ahead for more opportunities to bring poetry into the classroom.
