Teaching poetry is part of the curriculum for all grade levels K-5 at our school. Over the past three years, I’ve taught it in a very general manner, but I wanted to find a more meaningful to introduce key concepts and poetry terms to each grade level, while at the same time building upon skills from one grade level to the next.

In order to do this, I organized my unit into three main sections.

• Section #1 (with green backgrounds) includes Poetry terms that I will be focusing on with my Kinder and 1st grade students.

• Section #2 (blue backgrounds) will be used with 2nd and 3rd graders along with the previous green section terms.

• Section #3 (orange backgrounds) will be used with my 4th and 5th graders, but they will also be responsible for the terms in the previous two sections.

Each section contains poetry terms, definitions, and examples that I wrote to model each term. At the end, there is a “Show What You Know” quick review quiz that you can do immediately afterwards with your students.

I printed each page out as a poster, but then I also printed smaller versions of each page to use as an informal assessment tool. I simply hole-punched the cards and put them on a ring. When students came up to check out their books, I gave them the definition and they had to come up with the correct vocabulary word. You could also do the word and they have to describe the definition.

I ended up saving four different versions of the Power Point. One version is for Kinder-1st with only the green teaching and review pages. The second version is for 2nd-3rd with the green and blue teaching and review pages. The third version has all the pages for 4th-5th grade. I also included a fourth version, which does not have the actual vocabulary terms. You can print these out and give them to students as a way to review the terms to practice.

If you’re interested in using this lesson,  you can find it here at my TpT Store.

Want more lessons? Check out this blog post on Poetry Anchor Charts.

I hope you find this unit helpful!