3rd Grade · Reading · RL.2.4

Poetry Lesson Plan for 3rd Grade

A ready-to-teach poetry lesson for 3rd Grade, built around acrostic, haiku, couplet and cinquain forms, syllables and rhythm, rhyme schemes, figurative language, and reading poems closely. Print the plan, print the practice pages, and you are set.

Approximately 47 minutes

Learning objective

Read and comprehend acrostic poems passages independently
Build poetry vocabulary and fluency at the 3rd Grade level
Apply key reading strategies through acrostic poems practice

Materials

Read an Acrostic Poem: SUN
Count the Syllables
Match the Rhyming Words
Read a Cinquain: Rain
The Puddle
Write an Acrostic Poem: CAT
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 3rd 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 Acrostic Poem: SUN". 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

Acrostic poems · Haiku · Rhyming couplets · Cinquain poems · Poetry comprehension

Questions teachers ask about teaching poetry

What grades are these poetry worksheets for?

2nd, 3rd and 4th grade, with ten sheets for each grade. Each sheet's description names the grade it was written for, so you can choose a level, or move a child up or down a grade when a sheet feels too easy or too hard.

What kinds of poems do these worksheets cover?

Five: acrostic poems, haiku, rhyming couplets, cinquains and poetry comprehension. Each type has two sheets per grade, usually one to read or practice the form and one to plan and write a poem. The comprehension sheets use original ClassWeekly poems.

What is a cinquain poem?

A cinquain is a five-line poem. In the word form used in 2nd and 3rd grade, line 1 is a noun, line 2 has two adjectives, line 3 has three -ing verbs, line 4 is a four-word feeling, and line 5 renames line 1. The 4th grade sheets add the syllable form, with 2, 4, 6, 8 and 2 syllables in its lines.

How do you teach kids to count syllables in a haiku?

Clap once for each beat as you say a word: car-rot is two claps, so it has two syllables. A haiku has three lines with 5, 7 and 5 syllables. The haiku sheets start with clapping picture words, then counting whole lines, then writing a haiku with one dot for each syllable.

Do the poetry worksheets have answer keys?

18 of the 30 sheets do: every sheet with a right answer, such as counting syllables, finding rhymes or answering questions about a poem. The poem-writing sheets are open-ended, so there is nothing to mark right or wrong.