Poetry is a great tool for every English classroom. Whether you are a middle school, high school, college, or even an ESL teacher, it is an amazing activity for your students to express themselves and show their inner creativity.
Poetry is an excellent teaching tool for a variety of reasons:
- Poetry uses an assortion of literary elements. You can ask your students to use a variety of elements in their writing like metaphors, similes, alliterations, etc.
- Students can use specific rhythm in their writing. For example, have students write a poem in iambic.
- It can easily be used to teach vocabulary. Have students use specific vocabulary words in their writing. Using vocabulary is the best way to learn it.
- Poetry helps creativity. Use it to test students on their creative abilities.
These are just a few of the reasons why teaching poetry in the classroom should be a requirement at all levels.
If you wish to have your students write poetry as an assignment, it is necessary to have a rubric. Rubrics allow us to easily measure our students learning with impartiality. Indeed, since poetry is an extremely objective form of literature, it is difficult to grade without a general picture of how to measure the learning development of the students. This is not to mention that some students will whine about their grades if you cannot back it up with evidence. Because of this, guidelines are essential to adhere to.
Below, you will find a rubric I have created for this specific purpose. This guide may be used in your classroom for your students’ performance output and is a fantastic visible tool to check students’ learning development and application as they write a poem with various important features of poetic literature.
This rubric has a multitude of uses for teaching poetry as it may be utilized for various styles and themes. Feel free to add or delete whatever you think is necessary to be used in your classroom.
Good luck on your next teaching adventure!
Download the poetry writing rubric as a PDF.
Download the poetry writing rubric as a DOC.
