Your students could use the recordings as examples and select a poem to share with the group. Introduce your students to the work of Robert Louis Stevenson with the e-text of his A Child's Garden of Verses . Because the Japanese poetry form called haiku is so short and typically focuses on common topics that are easily understood, it is very popular with students. Have them follow the instructions to create their own haiku poems. After your students have drafted, edited, and revised their work, consider sending their original poems to the Webmaster for comment.
Many authors have homes on the Web, and poets are no exception.
Use these pages to help your students understand poets as well as poetry. Man of Many Talents is a great interview with the man himself, courtesy of the magazine Teaching K-8. Once a wedding singer and voice student, Prelutsky gave up a possible career as an opera performer when he heard Pavarotti and knew that he would never be the best. Thankfully, he didn't give up on finding an outlet for his creative talents, and we now have his terrific poetry books. Your class could create a project based on a Prelutsky poem, as third graders at South Knox Elementary in Monroe City, Indiana, did.