Spring Acrostic Poems to Beautify Your Classroom

How-To Write A Spring Acrostic Poem

Introduction to Acrostic Poetry

I am passionate about teaching poetry in the classroom. Children love to learn poems, and exposure helps them strengthen their reading, writing, and listening skills. Read this post to find out more about why teaching poetry to children is beneficial and how to introduce poetry in your classroom.

To start our lesson on acrostic poetry, I start by explaining it using these poetry styles posters. Acrostic poetry is poetry where the first letter of each line spells out a word or message. It is written vertically down a page to reveal the word. We can write acrostic poems about any topic that we have information and ideas.

A simple style of acrostic poetry to teach to children is using their names. Children write their names vertically and come up with ideas about each letter to write horizontally from each letter. Another idea would be to write acrostic poems about a particular topic you are studying in class. For example, if you are studying spiders, you could write an acrostic poem using ideas about spiders (i.e., S=Spin webs, etc.). Using a season as a topic for an acrostic poem works great to elicit vocabulary and thoughts about that season. For this lesson, we used spring as our topic.

Planning Spring Acrostic Poems

We started our lesson by reading Everything Spring by Jill Esbaum (affiliate link). This book helps fill our senses with spring vocabulary and photographs. To prepare to write spring acrostic poems, I created an anchor chart template of a spring acrostic poem that we could complete together.

We went letter by letter brainstorming and sharing with the class all the words about spring that we could think of for each letter. We wrote our ideas on the whiteboard as a reference. For example, S = sunshine, soaked, sprinkle, spring, sprouts, seedlings, etc.

Next, we went line by line, creating a sentence that began with a word. For example, Sunshine warms the Earth. Completing the poem this way together on the anchor chart helps those students that need extra support with their writing.

Writing Spring Acrostic Poems

Students get a blank template to write their spring acrostic poems. They are encouraged to use the words we thought of as a class, but to create their unique sentences (no copying from the teacher). This template and a few planning sheets are available for free at the end of the post.

Since we took a fair amount of time to learn and practice acrostic poetry writing previously, students are relatively confident and independent in writing their poetry drafts. For a lot of writing with young children, usually, one draft is enough, but with poetry writing, I like to have a polished, edited piece to add to a display.

Creating a Spring Acrostic Poem Display

As a display for our spring acrostic poems, we re-wrote our verses on cut-outs to look like rainbows. To create the same look, cut large curved pieces of white card stock and draw five curved lines going from one end to the other. This design creates six spaces, 1 for each line of the acrostic poem. Cut out two cloud shapes for the ends of each rainbow.

Students copy their edited poems in the spaces of their rainbow shape. I remind them to start writing midway to allow space for a cloud to be glued on to each end of the rainbow later on.

After re-writing their poems in the rainbow, they trace their writing with skinny markers to match the rainbow order. Remind students of the order (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple) beforehand. After tracing the words, they can use pencil crayons or crayons to color in the rainbow arcs with colors to match.

After the writing and coloring are completed, glue the two cloud shapes onto each end of the rainbow. Their spring acrostic poem display is complete!

Hang the spring acrostic poems up overhead to create a beautiful spring display that will brighten up any classroom.

Poetry Resources

Try the Spring Acrostic Poem Writing Templates

You can grab your own FREE spring acrostic poetry templates today by clicking the image below. Acrostic poetry writing and 12 other styles are included in the poetry writing unit available HERE. It includes posters, poetic terms, planning and creating sheets, many templates, and student poetry notebooks and covers.

Poetry Mega Bundle

The following resources can be easily integrated into the primary classroom and any language arts curriculum. Each offers a wealth of engaging poems and activities to build a ton of skills and a love of poetry!

Poetry Mega Bundle