April is National Poetry Month, and we have lots of fun activity ideas to celebrate! Here are suggestions for contests, projects, papers, and classroom assignments that are sure to get your students excited and deepen their appreciation of poetry!
Engage Students with Bloom’s Literature
Bloom’s Literature is an essential go-to source for poetry assignments and projects.
It features 2,600+ full-text poems, each with a corresponding analytical entry, allowing students and researchers to enhance their understanding of a poem’s power by reading the poem alongside criticism of it.
Ideas for project, papers, and classroom use:
- Ask students to select a poem and “rewrite” or update it for today’s audience.
- Use poems to illustrate or emphasize events in history, such as Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” on the Crimean War, Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” about the Civil War, or Poe’s “The Coliseum” about ancient Rome.
- Ask students to write an essay comparing and contrasting the way two poets have presented the same idea or theme.
- Use the relevant Essay Topics on selected poets as starting points for papers and research, to spark discussion, as lecture launchers, or as assignments.
- Ask students to read a stanza from a poem of their choice each day in April and to explain why they chose it.
Click on the links below for more information about Bloom’s Literature and to take a free trial:
Get Creative with Credo Reference‘s Mind Map
One of Credo Reference’s key features, the Mind Map, is an interactive visualization tool that teaches students how to develop subject vocabulary and identify connections between and across topics. This feature is embeddable in course pages, LibGuides, and websites!
Use Credo’s Mind Map to host an online (or in-person) poetry slam or contest for local teens!
- Have users log in to Credo Reference and use Credo’s Mind Map to search for a word, phrase, person, etc.
- Encourage teens to compose a poem using at least five of the words that make up the resulting map.
- Request that poems be emailed to you with the search term or phrase that was used
- Poems can include words not found in the Mind Map.
- Determine who will judge the entries.
- Celebrate the winners and finalists through social media posts, posts of winners recording themselves reading their poems, prizes such as T-shirts, coupons, or donations from local businesses.
- Source Reference (for K–12 Schools & Districts)
- Credo Reference: Academic Core (for Colleges & Universities)
- Credo Reference: Complete Core (for Public Libraries)
See also:
- Slam into Poetry Month with Contest Ideas from Infobase: Webinar
- Hosting a Meme Contest for Your Library? Give It a Try!
- Community Competitions at the Public Library! Engaging Teens with Infobase: Webinar
- Have You Seen the Library Video Gone Viral? Video-Creating Resources for Fun!
- Preparing Students for Lifelong Success: White Paper
