Stations of Poetry

Laura Randazzo wrote about a poetry activity she used in her classroom that broke down five different types of poetry and had the students go between stations and create their own poems. This is a great way to engage students in the classroom as well as have them experiment with different kinds of poetry.

The first station was blackout poetry. In short, blackout poetry is taking a page from a newspaper or book and blacking out the page except for the words you are using for the poem. This allows the students to read through the page and select words for their poem. Many forms of blackout poetry include artwork that the students make to cover the unselected words.

The second station was a new one to me, paint chip poetry. Briefly, students receive one of those paint sample cards and create a poem using three of the names typed on the card. This one challenges students to think and outline a concept for a poem before writing one out.

The third was termed reversal poetry, which is based around a worksheet that was given to the students. The students would then fill out the worksheet. This worksheet helps students to deconstruct the poem and analyze the structure and parts of the poem.

The fourth station is acrostic poetry. Acrostic poetry is built by getting a word, spelling it vertically, then writing a poem around that word. This gives the students the chance to narrow down the words they can use by limiting it to words that share letters in common.

The final station is centered around rolling dice, cleverly called roll of the dice. This sets the structure of the poem by rolling two dice, the numbers added together are the number of lines for the poem. The dice are then rerolled and this determines the number of letter for the first line and then rolled again for the second line and so forth. This challenges students in creating structure and the proper words to create a poem.

These kinds of poetry set up in stations like this is a great way to introduce students to poetry after going over the basics to help them understand poetry a bit more and help them understand it. This is a good way to engage the students in poetry writing and by sharing their writing they can find the value in it.


You can read Laura's Article here.