Since 1996, Americans have celebrated National Poetry Month throughout the month of April. Reading, writing, and reciting poetry is a great way to inspire kids' interest in words and wordplay, rhyme and rhythm, meter and metaphor.

The lessons and activities below are sorted roughly according to grade level. However, several of these resources overlap grade categories, so be sure to take a look at all them.

With these top free poetry teaching tools, April need not be the cruelest month in your classroom.

Best Poetry Lessons and Activities

All grades

Favorite Poem Project Lesson Plans
A fine collection of poetry PDF lesson plans, organized by grade and themes. Each complete lesson contains poetry video links, learning objectives, questions, homework ideas, and extensions. Founded by U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, the Favorite Poem Project has been encouraging, supporting, and recording Americans from every walk of life discussing their favorite poetry since 1998.

The Children’s Poetry Archive
A truly wonderful site for kids to explore and learn to love poetry. The Children’s Poetry Archive is geared toward kids ages 4 through 16 years, and includes a searchable database of recorded poems, sorted by themes, poet, age, and glossary. Resources for teachers consist of listening, learning about, writing, and performing poetry. Be sure to check out simple ideas to make your classroom a poetry-friendly place.

Magnetic Poetry Online Fun
Creative wordplay doesn’t get any easier than this. Simply open the magnetic poetry site and arrange the digital word “magnets” via the drag-and-drop interface. Don’t like the word bank? No problem, just click “load more words.” Save your poem as a link or share via Facebook. Looking for a wider range of words? Choose from Nature, Geek, Love, Poet, and Mustache (yes, really). This type of poetry writing allows everyone—including kids who aren't natural writers—to express themselves with language.

Rhyme Zone
More than just a rhyming dictionary, RhymeZone lets users quickly and easily find words, phrases, synonyms, antonyms, definitions, lyrics, homophones, and much more, to make their poems shine like a serpentine skyline. Need to go deeper? Try the advanced search, which provides details on meter, parts of speech, and rare words. A remarkably simple and free tool that will be invaluable to poets and songsters everywhere.

Readworks.org Poetry Resources
Research-based lessons and activities for K-12 students. Full free access to educators with registration. The teachers’ guide furnishes step-by-step methods to use the site’s activities wisely.

National Poetry Month with Poets.org
Extensive, up-to-date poetry teaching resources include: how to celebrate National Poetry Month in the virtual classroom; Dear Poet, a multimedia education project; and more.

Elementary

Edutopia: Using Poetry to Refine Students’ Collaboration Skills
Teaching kids poems?
Start not with The Odyssey
Try haiku instead

To be a master of haiku is rare. But almost anyone, including kids (and this lowly scribe), can write their own haiku, making it an excellent choice for an elementary grade poetry lesson. In response to his students’ desire to improve their collaboration skills, educator, and published poet Matthew James Friday developed this rewarding eight-step lesson plan based on the haiku form of poetry.

Poetry4kids.com
Author and former Children’s Poet Laureate Kenn Nesbitt’s multimedia poetry site offers not only a diverse selection of searchable poetry for kids, but also lessons in poetry writing, a rhyming dictionary, videos, podcasts, free “Streamable Learning” online events, virtual author visits, and much more. Check out Nesbitt’s YouTube channel too!

Shel Silverstein Learning Resources
Lessons, activities, and a Common Core-aligned teaching guide to the works and world of beloved children’s poet and author Shel Silverstein.

GiggleVerse
Home of "the funniest children’s poems in the universe," this site encourages children to read by providing them with new funny poems every weekday, both on the website and by email. Categories range from animals and holidays to "gross" and "cautionary tales" (tragic stories with amusing morals).

Middle School

PBS Learning Media Dogs That Changed the World Poetry
A complete standards-aligned one-hour lesson for grades 5-8 that leverages the human attachment to our canine companions. Students watch video segments featuring various aspects of human-dog relationship through the lens of history, culture, and society, then write and illustrate “list” poetry reflecting the different perspectives. Includes videos, handouts, rubrics and an assessment. Note that the link to “examples of list poems” under Part II: Assessment should be corrected to List Poem.

Emily Dickinson Museum Educator Resources
Browse lesson ideas, read the brief Emily Dickinson biography, and learn about her themes, style, form, meter, rhyme, and syntax. Six lessons explore a broad range of features in Dickinson's poems, from vocabulary to imagery to the role of location and provide a suggested list of “starter” poems. Note that the correct link for lesson ideas is here.

Poetry Foundation
The independent nonprofit Poetry Foundation provides a wealth of free online poetry and poetry teaching resources. Explore poems, both text and audio, by topic, author, or audience (such as children, teens, or adults). The educator’s section provides articles and guides illuminating selected texts, helping teachers home in on key teaching points. Resources for teaching poetry online add to the value of this poetry site.

Dear Poet 2026
A multimedia education project, Dear Poet calls on learners in grades 5-12 to write letters to award-winning poets. Students first select one of six poems, view the video of the author reading his or her poetry, then write a response. Each poet will respond personally to five student letters, which will be published as a PDF this summer. All students will receive a general response to their letters, as well as a certificate of recognition for their work. Submissions for Dear Poet 2026 will close on May 15, 2026, at 12 am ET.

High School

28 Ways to Teach and Learn About Poetry With The New York Times
A wealth of imaginative ideas to celebrate poetry in the classroom. Whether you ask them to keep track of their metaphors, create micropoetry, match a poem with an image, compare poetry with rap music, or learn a poem by heart (how quaint!) students are sure to be engaged and enthusiastic. As part of The New York Times Learning Network, this article and all linked articles within it are free, with no account required.

Edutopia: A Poetry-Writing Exercise to Support English Learners
Written by an English language learner educator, this article will serve as a guide to teaching poetry to ELL students. Includes each step of the process, downloadable PDFs, and a clear explanation of how kids will benefit from this type of lesson.

Video Collection: The Art of Poetry
Library of short lectures and conversations from The Art of Poetry, Robert Pinsky’s Massive Open Online Course. Filter by topics, poets, and poems. A good, quick way to look at themes such as “What is Great?” and “Freedom and Meaning.”

Poets.org Materials for Teachers
Explore a diverse collection of lesson plans, essays, reading guides, and questions for class discussion. Your teenage students will benefit from Poetry for Teens, a collection arranged by themes including love and relationships, politics and social justice, mental health, and other topics that speak directly to young people.

Poetry Out Loud
Try this fun and dynamic way to introduce students to poetry through the thrill of the spoken word and competition. Everything teachers need to implement the Poetry Out Loud program is provided at no cost, from lesson plans to making your program accessible.

Edutopia Teaching Poetry With Student Exemplars
Excellent article by author and high school English teacher Elizabeth Jorgensen in which she shares ideas and examples for teaching poetry to high school students, and inspiring them in the process.

Living Poets Digital Library
From the creators of TeachLivingPoets, this digital library provides an easy-to-navigate database of selected living poets, their spoken and written work, and links to their websites.

Poetry can support social-emotional learning as it connects with students in a profound way, says former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. 

“Poetry is a free space,” he says. “It's your internal free space in your mind, your feelings, the words you use, and you imagine it with images and landscapes. Your heart is boiling or heating up or flaring or volcanically wanting to explode. The poem is there for you; it'll contain that fire.” 

Within that free space, students have a chance to delve into trauma and other serious issues on their minds. “They talk about rape, they talk about suicide,” Herrera says. “Poetry then is the place, you can just open that mountain of fire, and write it and speak it and present it. And then we hear and we feel it. And it's a great way to find healing.”  

Herrara, who was U.S. Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, will be the keynote speaker at NYC DOE’s Beyond Access Forum: Moving Forward Together on November 2. The virtual event, which is open to all educators, will run 8 a.m.-2:30 p.m. ET. 

The child of migrant workers, Herrera is an alum of UCLA and Stanford University, and obtained his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. During his keynote, he will share a poem aimed at inspiring educators and their students.

“I want to uplift people's lives in whatever way I can,” he says. “I'm not Mighty Mouse -- I'm Minnie Mouse, I'm Micro Mouse. But I do want to help in whatever way I can, or inspire in whatever way I can.” 

His poetry collections include 187 Reasons Mexicanos Can’t Cross the Border: Undocuments. He has also created work for children, including Imagine and Jabberwalking, and much of his outreach work focuses on connecting poetry with young people. 

More Than Words on Paper 

As Poet Laureate, Herrera helped to launch “Wordstreet Champions and Brave Builders of the Dream,” a program in partnership with Chicago Public Schools. The effort saw Herrera connecting with nearly 40 English teachers to help expand their perception of what a poem was and how it could be created. In one exercise, teachers faced each other in two rows and talked, while other teachers walked between the rows writing down snippets of conversation they heard and then using that as the basis of a poem.

“We cut up paper, we used colors, we stood in lines, we shouted at each other, we walked through these little tunnels of people talking like little gauntlets. We painted things and made symbols,” Herrara says. 

The educators then brought these ideas and energies back to their district. 

Herrara also coordinates the Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio at Fresno State, which is also geared toward pushing the boundaries of what constitutes a poem. 

“It comes from the whole idea of not being so squashed into a small space talking about poetry. As I have taught through the years, students come into the creative writing program, wherever I've been, and they want to do art also. They're painters also, and they're writers, but there's no way for them to paint in their creative writing courses,” he says. “They want to merge writing and painting, and writing and sculpture, writing and dance, writing and performance. And all that is kind of pushed aside usually in a traditional creative writing workshop.” 

This philosophy also applies to mediums increasingly popular with students today such as social media.

“Poetry, like every expressive form, is multi-dimensional, but we just seem to have things in little boxes,” he says. “We can dance a poem, we can collage a poem, we can YouTube a poem. And we can do simultaneous expressive formats; playing jazz on the corner, doing YouTube at the same time, drawing and dancing at the same time.” 

A Way of Learning About the World

No matter what form a poem takes, it remains a form of personal expression, which is why it’s such a powerful medium for students, Herrera says.

“It’s a perfect place to express all that because it's so personal. What you get with poetry, it's just one hundred percent, one thousand percent, personal. It's the real you talking, it's not the school you,” he says. “So it's total expression, personal yes, but it also provides a possibility of new thinking and a new way of seeing things.” 

This can help students learn more about the world and themselves as well as help educators understand their students. Herrera says a good poem might cause a teacher to say, “Oh, I have to look at this issue differently now. I have to look at young people differently now because we hear a new thinking.” 

Herrera’s work is also steeped in respect for the teachers we find in all walks of life, from parents to guardians as well as the professional educators in our lives. “It's good to support our teachers because without teaching we have nowhere to go,” he says. “We are lost.”

• NYC DOE Beyond Access Forum Provides Professional Development Around Inclusive and Individualized Education
• AI Writing Programs Are Getting Better. Is That a Good Thing?
• Best Digital Resources for Teaching Poetry

This visual poem at BBC Arts is a great way to celebrate Go Fishing Day on 6/18. It involves a series of animations with a fun poem about going fishing.

Brought to you by Knovation, powered by ACT    

As we kick off the school year, I wanted to share my poem from the Boston Tech and Learning poetry slam. As we start another year, set a goal to inspire someone to reach their full potential. Thanks Carl Hooker (@mrhooker) for pushing me to dig down and try this.

The Match

I don’t want you to hear this poem

I want you to feel this poem

Because I am sharing my biggest fear in education

A fear that will drive this conversation

That fear is wasted potential

when someone doesn’t reach their full potential – that scares me

As educators, someone’s potential we often see

So how do I get over my fear

By become a match that lights somebody’s fire

Be the match that raises someone higher

Education is lighting a fire inside someone so they can be great

Lighting that fire can change someone’s fate

that student who needs a spark

that teacher who lost their desire

be that match to light their fire

FIRE is an acronym for you to remember

F – find your passion

What drives you to head into school every day

What drives you to mentor an aspiring teacher or leader often for no pay

Answer that

And That is your passion

I is for inspire

inspire somebody to reach their full potential

don’t just motivate them – inspiring is essential

because

we can motivate with extra credit

we can motivate with fear

But inspiring someone is when the potential will appear

You do that through building Relationships

be present

be accountable

get to know your students

get to know your colleagues

people learn FOR someone

not just From someone

And finally we get to E

every boy

every girl

every colleague

Every race

Because lighting someones fire starts in this place

Now close your eyes

Think of someone who’s fire needs be lit

Someone who needs a spark

You have someone in your thoughts

In your heart

Remember these words

Go back to school

and do something to light someones fire

You are the match

Through building relationships with everyone

And In your passion to inspire

You will be the match that lights their fire

Click here to watch me do this live at Tech and Learning Boston or watch below.

Dr. Matthew X. Joseph (@MatthewXJoseph) is currently Director of Digital Learning and Innovation for Milford Public School, Milford, Ma. Before Tech and Learning Boston 2018, he had the opportunity to present at #TLTechLive in Boston and New Jersey in 2017 and other state opportunities focused on Ed Tech Leadership and empowering teachers. Before Milford, he was a building principal for 11 years in Massachusetts. Other professional roles include: classroom teacher, PD specialist, and other district roles supporting technology instruction. Dr. Joseph holds licenses in general education, school administration, and MA superintendent. His master's degree is in SPED and he holds an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership from Boston College.

These engaging poetry apps, says Shelly Terrell, will help your students create and learn with poems.

1 Social Poetry pulls words from your Facebook feed. Users can add photos, customize, and share their creations.

2 With HaikuJAM, students create haiku with two other people (each person writes one line).

3 ImageChef allows students to create poems within shapes, as word clouds, or with images.

4 FridgePoems helps students create poems using the magnetic poetry concept.

5 With Poetry Creator’s Verses app, students can access several unique dictionaries (Hip Hop, LOL, etc.), contribute words, and share their poems online.

6 The Instant Poetry 2 app provides words to create poems; students can add images.

7 Foldpass is a game where students can write haiku with their friends.

8 Name Poem allows students to create and share acrostic poems.

For more, go to www.techlearning.com/may17

POETRY from The Poetry Foundation 

Explore poems by mood and theme with this eclectic digital library 

Pros: A focus on content over author makes this an engaging way to explore how different poets approach similar themes.
Cons: The poetry selection, although varied, is limited, and there’s little to do beyond browsing and reading.
Bottom Line: Although not a comprehensive reference tool, POETRY is a straightforward resource for discovering new poems and revisiting old favorites.

Read more here.

By Common Sense Education

App of the Day picks are selected from the top edtech tools reviewed by Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best ed-tech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly.