Dear Reader,

April showers bring May flowers.

Wow, I just wrote a poem! Easy peasy.

Yep, you guessed it. National Poetry Month has arrived… the perfect time to tune up your ears to the poetry singing all around you.  Did you know that poetry is older than writing? Although we can never know how or when the first poem was created, historians believe poetry was first chanted as a magic spell to bring good harvests. Later poetry became the way to hand down stories of people’s struggles, loves and triumphs.

To help you celebrate the music of words, we’ve put together lots of fun poetry ideas, games and activities. 

Enjoy!

Sally de Vincentis
CEO, APTE

Surprise Poetry

Here is a fun poetry game you can play with your students. Not only will they enjoy creating Surprise Poetry, but also the game is a great way to practice identifying parts of speech.

1. You can play the Surprise Poetry game with the whole class participating or divide your students into small groups.
2. Before you begin writing your poems, set up a sentence structure that the game will follow, for example: adjective, noun, verb, adjective, and noun.
3. Assign a part of speech to each student. Tell your students to write their words on a piece of paper and to keep them secret until it’s their turn to help create the poem.
4. Now following the sentence structure (adjective, noun, verb, adjective, noun) have your students take turns adding their words to create a Surprise Poem.
5. After the structure is in place you can gussie up your poem by adding adverbs, articles or change verb tenses.

Here is an example of a Surprise Poem we started here at APTE ...

Slimy pencil slid pretty car   (And then we gussied it up)
A slimy pencil slides into a pretty car

And just keep adding lines until you like the sound and size of your poem.

Five Great Ways to Celebrate Poetry EVERY Day

1. Sign up to receive a new poem every day by email. http://www.everywritersresource.com/poemeveryday
2. Share your poem with the world’s largest poetry community. http://www.poetry.com/poems/new
3. Begin each class with a poem.
4. Publish students’ poems in the school newspaper.
5. Ask students to memorize poems and recite them in class.

Double Trouble Puzzle

Not just an ordinary crossword puzzle, but one that adds a little rhyming fun to the mix.

DOWNLOAD Cross Word Rhyming

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