April is National Poetry Month. Here are some teaching ideas:

• Attend poetry readings in your community.
• Reread some favorite poems.
• Ask students to memorize poems and recite them.
• Read poems aloud to your students.
• Ask student to create their own anthology of favorite poems.
• Introduce a new poetic form each week and give examples of poems that use — or reinvent the form.
• Publish student poetry in your school newspaper or website.
• Publish a special anthology of student poems.
• Create a school poem asking each student to contribute a line.
• Give students a list of words and ask them to create a poem using those words.
• Invite students to write poems in response to their favorite poems (or to songs, TV shows, or artworks).
• Encourage students to write in the voice of someone else.
• Hold workshops where students discuss one another's work.
• Tape students reading their own poems or poems by others; encourage them to share the tapes with parents and friends.
• Decorate the classroom or the school with illustrated poems and pictures of poets.
• Hold a poetry exchange day with poems wrapped as gifts.
• Have your students write lines on small pieces of poster board and make them into poetry mobile