Anti-Poets in the Classroom: Six Tech-Based Ideas for Teaching Poetry to Reluctant Writers

Are your students having a difficult time with poetry? Teach Thought presents six technology-based poetry ideas for students who think that they hate poetry:

Sometimes poetry gets a bad rap for being too dense, too pretentious, too much of an acquired taste for mainstream consumption. While it’s true that I could name many a poem that fits those descriptors, it’s also true that working with poetry can be a most whimsical, intriguing, dare I say light-hearted experience for you and your students.

Try one of these six strategies during National Poetry Month to invite your students to explore the jungle of this most-feared genre.

1. Scrambled Poems

Give your students a poem in pieces.

It might be a short poem split up into words. It might be a long poem, split into lines. Put the scrambled poem into an envelope and have your students work together to use every word, discovering or creating organization patterns with the same “ingredients” the poet used.

Compare what they create to the original poem. What works better in the original? What works better in the student created poems? What clues did the students use to organize the piece?

I particularly enjoy using Robert Pinsky’s poem “Samurai Song,” split into lines, for this activity. Using laptops or tablets in a 1:1 classroom, the joy of unscrambling can continue on magneticpoetry.com where you can play with virtual kits of magnet poetry for free and unleash your students’ inner poet in a more free reign area. [...]

Keep on keeping on! More ideas at Teach Thought!