5th Grade · Reading · RL.5.6, W.5.3.D, RL.5.4

Poetry Lesson Plan for 5th Grade

A ready-to-teach poetry lesson for 5th Grade, built around speaker, imagery, theme, rhyme scheme and meter, how stanzas fit together, comparing two poems, and writing odes, tanka and poems for two voices. Print the plan, print the practice pages, and you are set.

Approximately 47 minutes

Learning objective

Describe a poem's speaker using clues in the lines
Explain imagery and figurative lines in a poem
Find theme, rhyme scheme and meter and tell how stanzas fit together

Materials

Read an Unrhymed Poem and Describe the Speaker
Write an Ode to an Everyday Object
Find the Imagery in a Poem About a Forest
Write an Unrhymed Poem About a Memory
Read a Ballad and Follow the Story
Write a Poem With Imagery About a Storm
Pencils, and whiteboard space for the modeled examples

Lesson steps

1. Build the background (5 min)
Introduce poetry in plain language and connect it to a book the class already knows. Write the key term where students can see it all lesson. For 5th Grade, one clear sentence beats a full definition.
2. Read aloud and think aloud (I do) (10 min)
Read a short passage aloud. Stop twice and narrate your own thinking about poetry: what you noticed in the text and what made you notice it. Students are learning the move, not the answer.
3. Guided practice (we do) (12 min)
Read a second passage together. This time students find the evidence and you record it. Push every answer back to the text with "what words told you that?"
4. Independent practice (you do) (15 min)
Hand out "Read an Unrhymed Poem and Describe the Speaker". Students read and answer on their own. Circulate and ask individuals to point to the line in the text that supports their answer.
5. Share and close (5 min)
Two or three students share an answer and the evidence behind it. Restate poetry one final time in the students' own words, not yours.

Check for understanding

Ask each student to point to the evidence in the text for one of their answers. A student who has the right answer but cannot find the line has not yet learned poetry.

Differentiation

Extra support. Students who stall: pull them into a small group and rebuild poetry with concrete materials or a simpler text before asking for the written work again. Do not send the page home as homework, it will just rehearse the misunderstanding.

Extension. Students who finish early: ask them to write their own poetry problem for a partner to solve, then check the partner's work. Creating a problem is harder than solving one and it surfaces whether they really understand poetry.

Skills covered in this lesson

Poetry comprehension · Poetry writing

Questions teachers ask about teaching poetry

What poetry skills do 5th graders learn?

5th graders describe how a speaker's point of view shapes a poem (RL.5.6), explain figurative language (RL.5.4), find a poem's theme (RL.5.2), and tell how stanzas fit together to give a poem its structure (RL.5.5). They also write poems with concrete words and sense details (W.5.3.D).

What is a tanka?

A tanka is a five line poem with 5, 7, 5, 7 and 7 syllables, like a haiku with two longer lines added. The tanka sheet gives a bank of nature words with their syllable counts and a box to check for each syllable.

What is a poem for two voices?

It is a poem read by two readers. Each reader has a column, and both read the middle lines together. The sheet shows a model about the sun and the moon, then children plan and write their own for a cat and a dog.

Do the 5th grade poetry worksheets have answer keys?

The 9 poetry comprehension sheets do. The 5 poetry writing sheets are open, so there is no single answer. Children check their poem against the rule printed on the page.