Trick or Treat- Create, Revise, and Present Halloween Poems

Trick or Treat- Create, Revise, and Present Halloween Poems Using a Word Bank is a fun 4-day lesson to celebrate Halloween or Autumn. The 21-page, easy-prep lesson plan will engage your students as they write, revise, and then present their poems. The lesson is designed to meet the needs of all your students through differentiation and scaffolding.

The detailed lesson plan is divided over 4 days, and each day presents a different aspect of poetry reading, writing, revising, and presenting. each day.

Day 1: Reading the Poems and Making Meaning- As a class, students will read several Halloween and/or Autumn poems (links to poems are provided) and make meaning of the poems by learning about author's craft and mood. The lesson plan gives step-by-step directions for teachers to model reading a poem, identifying literary devices (rhyme scheme, alliteration, etc) and figurative language (similes, metaphors, etc.) and to explore how the poet conveys mood in the poem.

Day 2- Creating a Word Bank and Writing Your Poem- The class rereads the poems, this time with the intention of choosing words that stand out to them that they might want to use in their own poem. The focus is descriptive language and the class creates a class word bank. (A sample word bank. is included.) Then students write their own poems.

Day 3- Response and Revision: Teaching Students How to Respond to Each Other’s Poems and Revise Them- In small groups, students share their poems, and learn how to peer respond to each others' poems. Then students revise their poems based on their own and their group members' ideas.

Day 4- Sharing their Poems- Poetry Reading or Poetry Slam- Students present their poems either with a small Poetry Reading in their small groups that later expands to the larger class after students vote on which poems to share from their small groups or a whole class Poetry Slam. The teacher directions for Day 4 are very explicit in how to either conduct a Poetry Reading or a Poetry Slam.

Students then will write a reflection on the whole experience of writing, revising, and presenting their poems.

Trick or Treat- Create, Revise, and Present Halloween Poems Using a Word Bank includes the following:

• a hyperlinked Table of Contents

• a force copy in Google Docs

• About this Resource, which includes an overview of the lesson, Essential and Guiding Questions, Standards, Objectives, Learning Targets, links to all the handouts, among other things

• Detailed lesson plans for each day

• The following handouts:

  • Sample Word Bank from the Mentor Texts

  • Peer Review: Responding to Classmates' Poems

  • Looking Back: Reflecting on My Poem and Writing Process

  • Sample Student Poems