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Welcome to the Online Poetry Classroom. Here you will find a wealth of resources, including Pedagogical & Critical Essays about poetry; extensive links to relevant websites; Curriculum Units & Lesson Plans; biographies of hundreds of poets; and thousands of poems.

Poets.org serves both as an interactive professional development program and a virtual community, enabling teachers across the country to access free poetry resources online. These teaching tools include innovative, classroom-tested curricula and discussion forums in which users can post strategies for and ask questions about teaching poetry at the primary, secondary, and university level.

The Academy of American Poets presents lesson plans that align with Common Core Standards, each of which have been prepared by a curriculum specialist concerned with developing skills of perception and imagination. We hope they will inspire the educators in our community to bring even more poems into your classrooms!

And the winner is... Students engage poems from popular films, and then create their own screenplay scene in which poetry is central.

Love as a Two-way Street In these activities, students explore the two-way love exhibited by one of poetry’s most famous couples: the Brownings.

Writing Letters to Poets Students explore and interact with poetry by writing letters to historical and contemporary poets.

Poems About Poetry What is poetry? Why is it important? The poets included in these lessons address these questions, as only they can, from their experience as poets.

From Light to Dark and Back These lessons ask your students to explore light and dark, with poems by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Robert Hayden, and Mark Strand.

We Sing America These lessons focus on "songs" about the American experience at different points in history, with poems by Whitman, Hughes, and Alexander.

Ghosts and Spirits This lesson provides students preparatory activities to hone their perception, collaborative reading, and imaginative post-activities.

Developed and tested by high-school teachers, the following lesson plans provide everything you need to administer a successful poetry unit in your classroom.

Voice
Students participate in a series of learning activities employing interconnectivity between poems used and core texts to explore poetry as social commentary.

Poetry in Translation
Students investigate their cultural backgrounds by translating the work of poets from their ethnic heritage as well as their own poems.

Women in Poetry
Introduces students to a range of women's voices in poetry through thematic lesson plans including "Voices of the Mothers" and "Ars Poetica."

Read some of the excellent essays on teaching that are available on Poets.org. Joan Houlihan asks whether poets can teach. Bill Zavatsky answers everything you always wanted to know about poetry. Also available is a helpful poetry glossary and a list of poetic forms and techniques.

This April, during National Poetry Month 2013, the Academy of American Poets is celebrating the role that correspondence has played in poets' development and writing lives.

In the spirit of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, in which Rilke replies to letters from a young military cadet and aspiring poet asking for his advice, we are inviting students to engage with poetry by handwriting letters to some of the poets who serve on the Academy's Board of Chancellors.

Find out how to participate, and browse letters from student poets >

Start your own now >

Great Poems to Teach
Compiled by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative, this list contains 341 poems submitted by teachers.

Tips for Teaching
Here are a number of creative and inexpensive suggestions for making poetry a more important part of school life during April and throughout the year.

Resource Center
Hundreds of links for teachers in ten important categories, including online teaching tools, government resources, and professional devleopment resources.