Building Classroom Community Through the Exploration of Acrostic Poetry

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.