Poetry slams are creative ways in which academic lessons can be conducted. The teacher and students decorate the classroom to resemble a coffee shop. A teacher can require that all poems fit a certain perimeter or cover a certain theme. Slams open up the door of poetry to students who can use the slam as a chance to perform or share their poetry with their classmates. Students will often feel more inspired to write better poems if they have to share it in front of the class.
National Poetry Writing Month is in April, and it can be a great inspiration for educators in the classroom. Encourage students to write one poem a day in class. The theme and style of the poem can change per day or per week. The students should not feel overwhelmed by the poems and should not spend more than 15 minutes on them in the class. At the end of the month, the students can collect their poems in a manuscript for safekeeping.
Together as a class or individually, students can come up with acrostic poems using content information from class lessons. An acrostic poem is one that uses the letters of a word to start each line, respectively. Each line should describe the subject. Acrostic poems can be used in any class for any subject. As a class, students can use acrostic poems to help remember history or science terms or remember grammar lessons. Plus, they are lots of fun.
In this activity students will be able to experience poetry in ways they conceivably haven't done yet. The students can pick their favorite poem, or any other poem they might like, memorize it, then write it from memory and recite it for the class. A follow-up on the idea is to record all the students' recitations for a class podcast or video. After the activity, have them also reflect on the value of committing poems to memory.