Poetry gets a bad rap in school. Most students seem to hate it. Many people will never write a poem once they leave school. It's the calculus of ELA. But we think that's a shame, because poetry is inherently playful, emotional, and removes the shackles of Freytag's pyramid, PEEL, and the like.
So we've got a few things to help inspire poetry in your classrooms:
- Discover Wishes, Lies, and Dreams
- Play our new monthly genre challenge
- Poetry Yearbooks: See what other teachers are doing
Discover Wishes, Lies, and Dreams
Wishes, Lies, and Dreams is our collection of poetry writing prompts based on the poet Kenneth Koch's 1970 classic book for teaching children to write poetry.
The games invite students to play with language, sound, and image, while not being overly technical.
John Warner joined us for a game and a chat, listening for and writing about all the sounds in the world around us. We'll be doing more demo videos for different game formats, so keep an eye out on our Youtube channel.
Play our new monthly genre challenge
We're now running a monthly genre prompt challenge to spice up your regular Friday games and give your students a little motivational booster shot.
Teachers often tell us how much students enjoy our avatars, and wish they could design their own prompt images. So we'll give the class that writes our favourite entry the chance to help us create a new avatar and prompt image for everyone to enjoy.
For our first challenge, we're warming up with a genre of poetry that's easy to learn, hard to master: the haiku. To enter, just play a game using our challenge prompt. For more details about the challenge, check out our blog post.
Poetry Yearbooks: See what other teachers are doing
We love reading poetry on Frankenstories. Whether teachers have created a great custom poetry prompt, are using one of our prompts, or the students have burst out into spontaneous poetic play (it does happen!).
We've put together some of our favourite poetry games from 2023 and 2024. Here's an example of a student response when asked to write from the perspective of a cloud!
Have fun writing poetry!
We look forward to reading it.