The Academy of American Poets sponsors a website (see Resources). This site features a free online poetry classroom designed to support educators as they encourage their students to learn, write and share poetry. It also includes discussion forums, essays, links to other sites, curriculum units and lesson plans, over 2,000 poems and ways to celebrate National Poetry Month.This month-long national celebration of poetry enlists a variety of educational leaders, poets and arts organizations in support of activities that include public poetry readings, poetry contests and poetry workshops. Among the techniques given are suggestions of not only how to observe National Poetry Month during the month of April, but also how to foster student participation throughout the year using a variety of methods too numerous to list.
On the Academy of American Poets website, you also will find listings of tips for teaching poetry from the National Council of Teachers of English and the Teachers and Writers Collaborative. Additional suggestions include publishing anthologies of student or classroom poetry, posting student poetry in the classroom and hallways, videotaping students reading their own poetry or that of their favorite writers, and attaching poems to balloons and having a poetry balloon sendoff.
Another method of getting students to share poetry is by having them write a poem about themselves. There are several ways of doing this but the most common is to have the student start with his own name and then add successive lines of description. For example, the second line could have three to five descriptive words about the student. The next line could include comments on the family or goals and dreams. Another line could include the student’s likes and dislikes. The poem ends with the student repeating his name or a line from the poem. Students are encouraged now to read their poem to the class or have it read by the teacher, omitting the name and asking classmates to figure out who wrote it.
Students tend to memorize the words from the songs they like the most. Having them write down the lyrics, checking them on the Internet and then reciting them to the class brings home the idea of poetry as an everyday tool of expression. This technique also can introduce the idea of poetry as a social commentary that the students can use to express their own feeling on any given topic. Students also can use this opportunity to comment through poetry on television programming, video games, or books they may have read and enjoyed. The student is limited only by his own creativity.