When it was time for me to teach poetry, I would inwardly cringe. I have never viewed myself as creative or able to write “flowery” language, so poetry always scared me. There are so many kinds of poetry, genres, and rules; my biggest fear was to pass my “poetry phobia” onto my students. So, I decided to research how to “teach” poetry (hopefully without tears!)

• a fun way to get started is to go to the library and get to “know” famous poets.
• find some of the favorite poems chosen by your class and post them around your classroom.
• have students memorize and recite some of their favorite poems
• gather poetry books for your classroom and proudly display them so students can access them
• find a song that is current and play it…. and then tell students that the lyrics of the song can be considered poetry!
• choose one genre of poetry at a time and study some of the most famous poets tied to that genre. Explore his or her poetry to get to “know” the genre. Then have students write some poems in the genre.
• Have fun!

For me the various types of poetry got a bit confusing, so having some of the basic genres together in one resource was helpful. I decided to include the following genres of poetry and put them together:  ABC Poem, Acrostic, Bio Poem, Cinquain, Concrete Poem, Free Verse, Haiku, and Limerick. This is what led me to create my poetry resource. I created it to be a “paper” version, and then it morphed into a Google drive interactive digital resource. Our resource contains both versions.

I hope that this resource may help you find teaching poetry and little less daunting!