Take your students on an unforgettable journey through poetry this time around. Ditch the cheesy acrostic poems and goofy poems of their childhood and take the challenge to teach your students 30 different kinds of poems, and to make things even more adventurous, challenge THEM to write 30 poems in 30 days!

Mud and Ink Teaching is founded on the belief that teachers should celebrate their natural curiosities and embrace adventure. That's what the 30 Day Poetry Challenge is all about! During National Poetry Month (April) or any time of the year that you teach poetry, I dare you to challenge your students to compose 30 poems in just 30 days.

Here in this product, you will find the teaching tools you need to deliver this challenge in a fun and powerful way. Included here are practical, easy to understand one-page handouts of 30 uniquely different types of poetry for students to experiment with. I've also included a digital poetry notebook for students to use as they work through the month composing their poems.

Are you looking for a catalogue of great poetry videos to share with and inspire yours students? Look no further! This AMAZING blog post from Secondary Strategies has you covered!

Have you ever had to convince a room full of 15-year-olds that poetry is cool? Or that, with your help, they’ll be able to understand it? Or maybe (if the planets align just so) that they’ll like it? If so, then you know all too well the poetry sales pitch every ELA teacher has had to make to those skeptical, unforgiving disbelievers.

Fortunately, videos of poets reading their works have become increasingly available online. Continue reading...

This resource addresses poetry vs. prose and figurative language. Students will have the opportunity to gain a better understanding of figurative language with 9 slides of interactive activities.

Included in this product:

• Suggested lesson plan
• Graphic Organizer on poetry vs. prose
• Figurative Language note-taking graphic organizer
• Interactive Match-Up with words and definitions
• Interactive Match-Up with example of figurative language
• Digital Task Cards with song lyrics that include figurative language
• Answer Key

There are six stations/task cards in this set: Formalist, reader response, biographical, historical, psychological, and gender. With the Formalist station/task, your students will partake in a traditional close reading analysis of the poem to break down form, imagery, mood, and sound devices. This ensures that your students will be prepared for traditional testing and discussion. To provide new perspectives to analyze the work, students will engage in a personal reflection on the poem (reader response), a biographical and historical research application to the poem, a psychological evaluation of the speaker/author, and finally a creative writing assessment to explore gender perspectives. Your students will be engaged and on-task critical thinkers!

April is National Poetry Month. If I were not an English teacher, I wouldn’t know this because I’m not a fan of poetry.

I possess an appreciation of poetry! I understand its contribution to the written word. I love that my students find meaning in poetry and write their own. Reading it in my spare time? Rarely happens. It’s simply not my favorite part of any ELA curriculum because I’ve never found poetry to speak to me they way literature and speeches do... continued...

It is important that English curriculum still includes poetry in its lessons. During this interesting, #2ndaryELA Twitter chat, teachers discussed how they used poetry in their classrooms - some teachers teach it as a stand alone unit, others integrate poems as mentor texts in any unit that it fits.

Teachers also shared their favourite poems to teach and which poetry forms their students enjoy writing. Scroll down to the read the curated Twitter chat and learn more using poetry in your ELA classroom. Continue reading...

What Poetry Bellringers Look Like:

Each of these thirty bellringers has a snippet of a classic poem, or the whole thing if the poem is short. Then, each bellringer has a different creative or analytical prompt. Students could identify poetic devices in one poem, illustrate another, create a new poem in the same style, etc.

Major Benefits:

1. Exposure – If you use one a day for a four-week Poetry Unit, your students would be exposed to twenty poems!
2. Energy – After the Bellringer phase of class, you could extend your study and conversation about a certain poem, or you could move on. If you decide to move on (which I do), students won’t feel like they’ve beaten a poem to death...continue reading and download the freebie...

I’m not a big poetry fan. Just like I’m not a big fan of fantasy novels, professional basketball games or anything coconut. But as an English teacher, it’s kind of expected to include teaching poetry somewhere in the curriculum. I had to figure out one or more ways to address the problems I had with poetry.

Some problems I had with poetry related to how much I dreaded the study of poetry as a student (which is basically where the 5 ways to make students hate poetry post came from.)

Read on...

1. Emphasize one right interpretation of a poem. Make sure not to explain that interpretation, but insist that it’s obvious.
2. Focus on how students feel about a poem. Ignore that some students may not feel anything, may not care to discuss feelings, or may even not be touchy-feely sorts anyway. Everyone needs to have feelings from and about poetry, so make sure that is your focus.
3. Pick only challenging poems with unusual structure or vocabulary and lots of implied meaning. Make sure that no poems are easily accessible so that students have to work to understand and ‘get.’ the poems. Also, see #1.
4. Don’t let students hate selected poems or poetry. If they express that, dismiss it or assure them they ‘just don’t understand.' ....read on...

In this freebie, Addie Williams brings us...

"Figurative Language / Poetry Terms - Definitions and examples of poetry terms / figures of speech - alliteration, hyperbole, onomatopoeia, simile, metaphor & personification. There is space for students create their own examples. I like to give this to students as a fun review, or as a reference sheet in their notebooks. The product also includes a blank organizer so that students can add additional terms!"

Check out her store on TpT!

Check out this HUGE compilation of poetry ideas for 5-8th graders from Addie Williams! She writes, "This comprehensive package includes some of my BEST SELLING poetry items on TpT! Everything you need for all of the poetry projects is included! All of the activities can be adapted for different ages and abilities - I have successfully used these activities from 5th - 10th grade!"

I especially love these activity ideas:

"My Life in 30 Words" Poetry Activity: Have students write a 30 word poem about themselves. Includes assignment sheet, brainstorming worksheet, templates and examples. Great for Back to School!

"Hero Music" - Music Lyrics as Poetry: Using music lyrics as an example of poetry, students pick songs that best exemplify the idea of a hero.

Kim from OC Beach Teacher shared an awesome blog post from The Literary Maven. Here in this blog post, each contributing author challenges teachers to teach 30 poems in 30 days. Here's a quick peek into the beginning of the post...

As an English teacher, I have always loved teaching poetry. I used to confine it to one unit every winter as a way to engage students after winter break, but recently shifted to starting my year with poetry. Why wait to get into the good stuff?

To help you accept this challenge, either now or at any other point in the school year, I've put together a list of 30 poem recommendations, some from myself and some from other middle and high school English teachers. These are poems that our students love and we hope yours will too. Continue reading...

In this great freebie, The Reading & Writing Haven brings students a fun, easy way to get ready for more serious and difficult poetry. She writes,

"Teaching students to analyze poetry can be challenging. This product uses pop culture music ("Where is the Love" by the Black Eyed Peas) to engage students in discussion about the lyric poem. It includes analysis questions which encourage students to identify parts of poems as well as many open-ended, high-interest discussion questions that will help teachers facilitate lively class discussions. Analyzing poetry through music can be fun! Use this engaging poetry analysis assignment as a hook for a larger poetry unit, as a tool to teach students about analysis, or just because!"

In an attempt to make poor Willy more charming for my students, I have found several activities to be successful at engaging students and teaching important ELA concepts through Shakespeare’s plays. Specifically, I’m going to talk about my experience with literary devices in Romeo and Juliet, but these ideas could be transferred to any of Shakespeare’s plays.

So what works? As you like it. Here goes:

Continue reading...

Literary terms and figurative language can be fun to teach and discuss, but students often confuse them because of how many exist! I am always looking for ways to make repetition and extra practice fun, which is why I made this game.

Through the use of a game board, would you rather? cards, and group interaction (2-4 players is recommended), students will have fun while practicing the main literary terms and figurative language devices over and over. If students answer questions correctly, they advance along the board. If they answer incorrectly, they Get Schooled! When students draw a Get Schooled! card, they read it to the group, and everyone earns a free review of a literary term.

The game includes 25 different literary terms, including similes, metaphors, personification, alliteration, assonance, allusion, hyperbole, understatement, oxymoron, paradox, motif, theme, verbal irony, dramatic irony, situational irony, imagery, tone, mood, onomatopoeia, pun, foils, foreshadowing, symbol, and idiom.

Check it out!