Poetry Video Collections and Lesson Plan Starters to Help You Teach National Poetry Month

If you listen close enough, you just might hear a sonnet on the spring breeze. That’s right, it’s National Poetry Month! An epic celebration of verse, rhyme, and wordplay is here to take over our social media feeds and our classrooms. At Boclips for Teachers, we’re here to help you make the most of this month with lesson guides and video collections ready for your classroom.

Are you remote or virtual teaching your spring units this year? You can share entire collections with students or pop individual videos right into Google Classroom. Our lesson planning resources will also help make the virtual shift hassle-free.

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Lesson-ready collections

Inside Boclips for Teachers, you’ll see two collections with lesson guides specifically for National Poetry Month:

Both collections are designed to last all month long as an integration or project alongside your current scope and sequence. Students will encounter a variety of poems, record their analysis in a poetry journal, and exercise their own creative writing skills culminating in a classroom open mic. One guide is for middle school students and the other for elementary school (grades 4 and 5), but don’t worry—these activities and videos can be easily adapted for your age group.

As students progress through a short series of videos, you will help your students build an appreciation for poetry, gain confidence in performance, and explore their creative freedom within poetic forms. Each video is accompanied by an activity or assignment suggestion to get your lesson planning inspiration started.

Lesson guide outline

1. What is National Poetry Month?
2. Accents (Singing and Speaking for elementary)
3. What’s a Poem Anyway?
4. How Stanzas Organize Poetry
5. The Poetry of Culture and Identity

Don’t have an account with us yet? You can access the lesson guide here, or schedule a demo to find about more about access our entire growing collection of Common Core and NGSS aligned lesson guides.

Engage students with poetry

If you’re looking to incorporate poetry in a new format this year, browse our collection of the best contemporary poetry for high school.

Weaving in poems from contemporary poets alongside the classics is a great way to engage your students. Through stories and themes around modern life, students have an opportunity to see themselves in living artists. We’re all poets - and both contemporary and slam poetry are productive creative avenues for young people to explore their personal experiences on issues they care about. Our Spoken Word & Slam Poetry collection has a lesson guide, too!

To see more collections and lesson guides, head over to Boclips for Teachers and schedule a demo. Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for poetry prompts all month.