Choose a few different types of poetic structure to teach your students, for example, sonnet, haiku and limerick. Pretend you are one of the types of poem and have students ask questions to ascertain your identity. They might ask such questions as "Do you contain rhyme?", "Are you written in iambic pentameter?" and "Are you usually about something serious?" Allow the student who guesses your identity correctly to be the next person at the front.
Read a short situation or story in prose to your students. Have them choose one of the poetic structures you have been studying into which they must translate the situation. You might give them something short, such as "While walking to school today I realized that I had forgotten my homework." A student might translate it into a couplet such as "Without my homework in my hand/ I know from school I would be banned."
Teach students how to identify the rhyme scheme of a poem. Teach them to write a small letter "a" next to the first line, and another "a" next to every line that rhymes with it. A "b" should go next to the second line if it does not rhyme with the first, and another "b" next to each line that rhymes with the previous "b" line, and so on. Have your students practice this with a race. Put a verse or stanza of poetry on the board. Have students write the rhyme scheme down as quickly as they can. The first student to correctly finish wins.
Bring a stack of magazines into the classroom. Break the class into groups of two or three students. Give a few magazines to each group. Have students look through the magazines for advertisements that make use of poetic structure. Give students a checklist of poetic items they must find and cut out, such as a rhyming couplet, an example of internal rhyme and end rhyme, alliteration, metaphor or anything else. The first team to correctly complete the checklist wins.