April is Poetry Month

For over 20 years, libraries, schools, and poets have celebrated April as National Poetry Month. This post will provide you with great resources that you can use in your classes. We hope they can help instill the love of poetry in our students!

1. Poets.org This is one of the best sites. There you can download this year’s poster, participate in Poem in Your Pocket Day (April 27), explore how the Dear Poet project appeals to students, sign up to read a Poem-a-Day and check out 30 more ways to celebrate.
2. PBS NewsHour & Poetry. The Newshour has a great Poetry Series which it creates modern poets for students with lessons and videos. 
3. NCTE Poetry Page. The NCTE's Read.Think.Write. website has many resources for teachers and connections to additional resources.
4. NYT Learning Blog's "28 Ways to Teach and Learn About Poetry With The New York Times."  
5. Try a Golden Shovel Poem! NYT Article
6. Edutopia. There are 16 great resources here, including many for elementary teachers. 

NYT Student Opinion: Should White Writers Translate a Black Author’s Work?

Here are some additional resources from Richard Byrne's FreeTech4Teachers blog:

Poets.org offers thirty activities for celebrating National Poetry Month. If you'd like even more ideas for National Poetry Month, take a look my short list of suggestions below. 

ReadWriteThink Poetry Interactives
Earlier this year ReadWriteThink relaunched nearly all of their interactive writing tools so that they no longer relied on Flash. That means you can now use them in any modern web browser. My favorite of their interactive poetry writing tools is the Word Mover tool that resembles refrigerator magnet poetry. Take a look at this short video to see the current version of ReadWriteThink's Word Mover interactive.

Coding With Poetry Coding With Poetry is a feature from Code.org. There are two activities available on the Coding With Poetry page. The first is a short, Hour of Code activity in which students animate a poem by writing some simple code. The second is a longer activity that is part of Code.org's Computer Science Connections curriculum. In the second activity students write a program that writes poetry (I did a similar thing with my 9th graders last year and it took some of them two class periods to complete it).

Poetry With AI Verse by Verse is an experimental AI project from Google. Verse by Verse lets you compose poems by combining lines from the works of famous poets. In other words, it's a poetry remix tool. To use it you simply visit the site and select three poets to inspire you. Then you write your own first line of a poem. Once you've written a line of your own Verse by Verse will suggest three lines from each of the three poets you originally selected. You can then include those lines in your new poem. Finished poems can be downloaded as text overlaid on an background image.  

Make Beliefs Comix offers more than 700 writing prompt pages. All of the pages are designed to be printed and given to students to write on. Within that collection, you will find a small collection of poetry pages. All the printable poetry prompt pages include artwork designed to spark a student's imagination. Some of the artwork is in color and some are in black and white. A bonus of the black and white artwork is that you're essentially getting a coloring page and poetry prompt in one package.

Poetry 180 is a Library of Congress project that was created when Billy Collins was the U.S. Poet Laureate. The purpose of the project is to provide high school teachers with poems for their students to read or hear throughout the school year. Collins selected the poems for Poetry 180 with high school students in mind. I didn't look at every poem in the list, but of the dozen or so that I looked at, none would take more than a few minutes to read in a classroom. Speaking of reading in class, Collins encourages teachers to read the poems aloud or have students read the poems aloud. To that end, here's his advice on how to read a poem out loud.

There's a Poem for That is a series of twelve TED-Ed lessons featuring six famous works. The lessons include poems from Frost, Shakespeare, Yeats, O'Keefe, Gibson, and Elhillo.

Here are additional resources from PBS & NPR:

"“Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all -..." -Emily Dickinson April calls on us to celebrate the power and beauty of poetry. As we continue to experience the effects of this pandemic, it's important for us to turn to words that evoke inspiration, hope, and resilience. Use these resources, produced by WGBH Education and available on PBS LearningMedia, to celebrate National Poetry Month with your students.

Poetry in America gathers distinguished voices from all walks of life to explore and debate 12 unforgettable American poems. Athletes, poets, politicians, musicians, architects, scientists, actors, entrepreneurs, and citizens of all ages join together with host and Harvard professor Elisa New to experience and share the power of poetry. Grades 6-12. These resources are from Season 1 of Poetry in America. Be sure to catch Season 2, premiering this Saturday, April 11. Check your local public media station listings for details. Poetry in America

Explore the power of language, look at the world with a fresh sense of wonder, and build reading and writing skills. These video segments, drawn from the PBS Poetry Everywhere series, capture some of the voices of poetry, past and present to expose students to a broad spectrum of poetic voices and build their appreciation for poetry. Grades 7-12 Poetry Everywhere

Poems for Young Learners Help build your young learner's appreciation for poetry with these excerpts from the beloved Between the Lions television series on PBS LearningMedia. Grades Pre-K

Tuning Up

Big Snow

Baby Chick

Consider These Other Resources This podcast from NPR LifeKit: We Need Art Right Now: Here's How to Get Into Poetry provides five practical tips for poetry appreciation. Great for your older students or yourself. Listen on the web site, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Writer's Almanac, is an almost-daily compendium of a poem, facts about poets and other authors, and other interesting bits from the literary and history worlds. Published by Garrison Keillor, you can get it in the form of an email, read and listen on the web site, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.