Whether you are introducing poetry to new year 7s, exploring unseen poems or teaching an anthology for GCSE or A-level, you'll know that helping students to articulate their own, personal response to a poem is key to building their engagement and interest.
If you are just starting out with teaching poetry with younger students at KS3 as part of a poetry unit, try First impressions of a poem, Inference rectangle or Ideas for approaching a poem for instant feedback and honest responses which will help to validate young people's initial reactions and build their confidence when discussing poetry.
Our Unseen poetry collection is a selection of teaching resources which includes a range of carefully scaffolded resources to build students' confidence. Unseen poetry with a SMILE and CLIPS response to an unseen poem provide helpful acronyms for students to use and figurative language prompts, while Vocabulary for poetry analysis will help students to convey their ideas in their written work.
Teachit's poet in residence, Trevor Millum, has been generously sharing his insights and creative teaching ideas with English teachers for years. His open-ended Poetry Place resources are ideal for pre-reading activities and exploring unseen poetry, and include notes for teachers and engaging classroom activities for students across the key stages. A great place to start for an engaging poetry lesson is with Creative tasks for Maya Angelou's poem 'Life doesn't frighten me'.
Michael Rosen argues that rather than thinking about how we teach poetry, we should reframe it as playing poetry. In 2021, National Poetry Day was on the theme of 'choice', a theme that works perfectly for any poetry writing experiments, and in celebration of the day, Trevor Millum shared his deceptively simple and playful teaching approach to writing new poems with his aptly named resource, You choose. This informal lesson plan resource guides students to carefully consider their choice of words and quickly get their ideas down on paper as free verse. It's a brilliant whole class or small group approach to get students writing their own poems and using their own voices.
Our 20 ideas for teaching poetry resource also includes a range of playful and fun ideas, or try the perennially popular A simile quilt, which offers a novel take on teaching metaphors and similes.
Enjoy playing!
This article was first published as an Editor's pick newsletter in September 2021.
