A Holiday Preview: National Poetry Month

A Backstory

I’m one of those folks who walks into a department store and shakes my head at how far in advance holiday displays go up. 

Back-to-School sales in July? Way too early. 
Christmas decorations up before Halloween? Come on, people. 
Valentine’s Day starting in early January? Give me some breathing room, people.

Still, there’s one celebration I can’t start too early, and that is National Poetry Month. I can’t help myself. The March Slice of Life Challenge is exciting enough, but it’s even more exciting when I know Poetry Month will follow.

I’m already thinking ahead to the many ways I’ll be enjoying April with my students and school community, and today I’ll share some of my ideas with you.

Getting in the Holiday Spirit

The best holidays start with fun decorations. National Poetry Month involves making sure there’s poetry as far as the eye can see. Whether it’s up on school walls, in the copy area, the staff bathroom or the teacher’s lounge, I want folks to interact often with poems.

I get those pieces from several sources. You can print or share the gold that comes through Poem-a-Day newsletters from both the Poetry Foundation and the American Academy of Poets. For something a little more home-grown, I created a Need a Haiku? Take a Haiku! printable:

As for student-friendly work on the walls, I take a page from Stacey Shubitz’s playbook and encourage students to turn the school into a living poetry anthology. Students write and contribute poems to be posted around the school. Food poems go by the cafeteria, spring poems get displayed by the recess doors, and so on. Warning: submissions start slowly, but once kids see work displayed, it’s hard to stop them! 

The Details: Activities to Try

Where I live, National Poetry Month takes place at the heart of standardized testing season. It’s the best time for students to play with language and have fun, but it’s also the worst time to demand a lot more for teachers and students to do.

The activities and resources I’m sharing can hopefully take place in small increments of time, such as start-of-school transition time, after completion of standardized tests, or whenever kids have the chance to engage in “may-do” activities.

Inside Poems: Students start with any object: a pencil, a book, a friend. The start of each line is “inside,” with the poem moving deeper and deeper as it goes. I’ve used this with second grade on up. Here’s a fourth-grade example:

Ars Poetica. I love the name because it sounds fancy, but it’s just another way of saying it’s poems about poetry. How does poetry make us feel? What does it do for us? What can we compare it to? Here’s a student example that plays with both language and form:

Want more resources?

• Check out the Poetry Month Festivities from the American Academy of Poets. 
• In the U.S., you can find your state’s Poet Laureates through the Library of Congress. 
• You can also learn about who our Youth Poet Laureates are (or how to become one)!
• And don’t forget to observe April 10, which is National Poem in your Pocket Day!

One Thing to Remember

National Poetry Month is a time to celebrate writing, to take joy in words, and to play with language. It’s a time of year where I see writers young and old come alive in ways I don’t get a chance to witness otherwise, and it’s a chance to bring our school community in creative and exciting ways.

How about you? Comment below with your favorite ways to observe National Poetry Month. Let’s get those ideas started!