April is poetry month. At least that’s what Scholastic tells me. Scholastic has assembled a big list of lesson resources for teaching poetry this month. One of the resources that I really like is the Poetry Idea Engine. The Poetry Idea Engine is a simple, interactive tool that helps students create four types of poems; haiku, limerick, cinquain, and free verse. To create poem on Poetry Idea Engine students select one of the four formats. If they pick one of the first three format students will be given a short explanation of the pattern before completing the template to create their poems.

Applications for Education
As a student when my teachers had us write poems I always struggled to come up with ideas to write about. Then when I taught language arts for a year (my first full-time gig before teaching social studies) I saw some of my students have the same struggle with poetry. The Poetry Idea Engine could be a great tool to help students who struggle to come up with ideas for poems.

Poetry Idea Engine will work on your interactive whiteboard, but it will not work on your iPad.