National Poetry Month Ideas for Social Studies

​National Poetry Month isn’t just for English classes. Poetry can be integrated into a variety of subjects. In our roles as a classroom teacher and school librarian in Fairfax County, Virginia, we’ve put our heads together to come up with easy ways to integrate poetry into social studies, or really any subject. We believe that when librarians and teachers collaborate that bigger and better things happen for students. ​

Idea 1: Poetry as Processing
Divide students into groups and have each group  investigate primary sources from a time period. Next, have students report out on the information or perspective of the primary source using a poem. Have the students share the poems in a historical poetry slam.

Idea 2: Poetry as an Exit
Have students write a three line poem about what they learned in class. Students can then share their poems the next day with other classmates and exit pass poems can be posted in a collective area in the room for everyone to read.

Idea 3: Haiku as Review
Give students a historical figure or event and challenge them to write a haiku about it. Then play guess who. Other students have to guess who the person is or what the event is based on the haiku.

Idea 4: Poetry as Tweets
Challenge students to write a short poem or haiku that is 140 characters long summarizing a historical event, person, historical place or document. Use a classroom twitter feed to share these poetry as tweets with the world.

Idea 5: Poetry as Current Events
Ask students to find a current event and then work individually or in groups to write a poem about it. Poems can be shared in a gallery walk, along with current event articles that inspired the poems.

Idea 6: Progressive Poetry
Have students collectively write a poem that captures the key concepts in a unit. Each student writes one line and then passes it on to the next student. This can be done as a whole class or small group activity.

We hope you will try one of these ideas or that it will inspire you to create one of your own. If you do, please comment below and check out the rest of BubbleUp Classroom. -- a site we’ve created to share our collaborative work because we believe that sharing and inspiring one another is truly what teaching is all about.

Corey & Gretchen

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You might also like:

• Book Spine Poetry: Building Poems One Book at a Time (April 26, 2016)
• Can't Stop. Won't Stop: More Poetry! (April 13, 2016)