Teaching Space

Teach the world's best poetry

Poetry is best enjoyed and taught by hearing it out loud and now that so many children are learning from home, we’ve brought together some resources to help you inspire your class about the importance of poetry and the fun to be had in exploring it.

We gathered resources here to help you teach poetry. There are activities for all key stages, built around Poetry Archive recordings and offering lively, engaging ways of working with poetry.

We've also included links to some of our favourite organisations who also provide support for teaching poetry so you should find resources to answer all your questions.

Getting started with the poetry archive teaching space

The Children's Poetry Archive can be a fantastic place to support teaching poetry. To inspire you, we've put together a few resources with suggestions that can be used with any poem in the website.

Listen

The more we listen to poetry, the more we become tuned in to the way meaning is conveyed through sound.

Try these activities centered around listening.
Learn

Learning a poem helps us to better appreciate and understand it and gives us a feel for its rhythms.

Here are some ideas of how to get children excited in learning poetry.
Write

Most people find writing poetry enhances their  knowledge of how it works.

These exercises and activities are focused on writing.
Perform

Performing a poem is one of the most effective ways to explore its music and its meaning.

This resource has activities all around performing.
The poetry-friendly school

A poetry-rich school environment is the best way for children to develop their knowledge and appreciation.

Here are some tips on how to bring more poetry into your school.
Mission

This fun guided activity by Laura Mucha walks you through her step by step journey to writing a poem. 

Follow along and write your own poem.

Looking for more teaching materials?

We have more teaching resources for you to explore, including Classroom Materials that offer lively plans and activities and engaging ways of working with a particular poem and Classroom Collections, our curated collections that provide new and exciting ways to explore poetry.

Latest resources
Resource
Children’s Challenge: All Sorts

This challenge take you on a journey through lots of different kinds of poems to find the answers to all sorts of questions. You will ...

Learn more
Resource
Children’s Challenge: Animals and more

Animals, fish and birds pop up in lots of poems on the Children’s Poetry Archive, some real and some imaginary ones, doing all sorts of ...

Learn more
Resource
Children’s Challenge: Earth Day

This challenge takes you on a tour of the natural world and all the beautiful things we see around us. To find the answers, all you ...

Learn more
Resource
Children’s Challenge: Weather

Clouds, wind, rain, snow, ice, sun – you will find all sorts of weather in the poems on the Children’s Poetry Archive. Find out how ...

Learn more
Resource
Children’s Challenge: Halloween 2023

Halloween is a time for witches, ghosts, spells and strange happenings. This challenge introduces you to a world of spooky things and ...

Learn more
Learning Resource
Children’s Challenge: Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia more simply means words that sound like or define a characteristic of the thing they describe, for example ‘Slithery ...

Learn more
Learning Resource
Children’s Challenge: Alliteration

This challenge is about helping children understand some of the ways in which poetry works so well. One way is by using alliteration, ...

Learn more
Learning Resource
Children’s Challenge: Poem Hunt

This challenge is all about finding poems on the Children’s Poetry Archive. You will need to use the search bar in Let’s Explore to ...

Learn more
Resource
Children’s Challenge: Spooky Special 2022

Halloween is all about ghosts, witches and wizards, spooky happenings, tricks and treats. This challenge is all about poems full of ...

Learn more
Explore all resources
Close