The Poetry Foundation has a large selection of videos of poetry and interviews with well-known authors, including the Children’s Poet Laureate. Among their other resources is a Poetry Tool, where you can browse through a selection of poems by age group or category.
These resources are also available as an iPhone/iPad app and for Android devices.
From site:
The historical record reveals factual evidence, but poetry can lend meaning and emotional dimension to the telling of history. In this activity, students analyze primary source documents from the Library of Congress, then share their understanding through the illustrated poetry they create.
In this activity, students analyze and interpret historical, primary source content, then synthesize the information, making personal connections with history as they retell it from their own perspective. The activity provides an opportunity for students to creatively share their historical understanding with an authentic audience.
While writing original poetry can be daunting to students, this activity uses a “found poetry” strategy. Using rich primary source texts, students select words that allow them to retell the historical content in poetic form. Students use primary source images first for analysis, then as graphical support for their poems.
Student poems and images can be collected and published as a classroom “chapter book” organized by prominent historic themes and events from the National History Eras. The classroom publication also could focus on broad historical themes.
Sadly, this is a flash-based game that is no longer available. For other poetry and rhyming activities, please look at our collection of Poetry Websites for Students and Kids.
Find your way through the poetry maze by finding phrases that rhyme, or have similar rhythm or alliteration. Each time you identify one correctly, you gather a key to help you out of the maze.
From site:
Learning poetry’s special characteristics can help students understand, appreciate, and compose poetry. One defining characteristic of poetry is the use of line breaks to create rhythm and rhyme, suggest meaning, and produce a particular appearance. The Line Break Explorer engages children in exploring a poem (shown at left) and hypothesizing about why lines are broken where they are in poetry. Students then experiment with line breaks and how they affect rhythm, sound, meaning, appearance, and can substitute for punctuation in poetry. Their practice with line breaks can be printed out for peer and teacher feedback and discussion.
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