Building Classroom Community through the Exploration of Acrostic Poetry

Lesson Introduction

Building classroom community is one of the most challenging yet most important tasks for any teacher, and it needs to be reinforced frequently throughout the year. This lesson gives students the opportunity to be innovative, creative, and expressive while building a sense of community. In this lesson, students explore the genre of acrostic poetry and participate in a shared writing experience with acrostic poems. Using the Internet, students explore and investigate the characteristics of acrostic poetry. They then brainstorm positive character traits about one of their classmates using an online thesaurus and compose an acrostic poem. Students use an interactive online tool to write and print the final draft and then share their poem with the class.

Learning Objectives

In this lesson, students will have opportunities to:

  • Learn the structure of acrostic poetry by viewing examples on the Internet.
  • Understand and apply knowledge of acrostic poetry by composing an acrostic poem about one of their classmates.
  • Build community in the classroom by focusing on peers’ positive character traits and applying them to poetry. 

Materials and Resources

To teach this lesson, you will need:

  • computers with Internet access and connection to a printer
  • LCD display monitor (optional)
  • several print thesauri (optional)
  • Acrostic Poetry Booklist
  • printouts (attached)
Lesson provided by ReadWriteThink.org, a website developed by the International Reading Association and the N.C.T.E.

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