This post details how to teach students to write a spring acrostic poem. We used spring as a topic for our acrostic poems. This post outlines preparing, planning, writing, and creating a rainbow poetry display.
How To Write A Spring Acrostic Poem
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. Learn more about why teaching poetry to children is beneficial and how to introduce poetry in your classroom.
Table of Contents
Introduction to Acrostic Poetry
To start our lesson on acrostic poetry, explain it using poetry posters. Acrostic poetry is poetry in which 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 we have information and ideas about.
A simple style of acrostic poetry to teach children is using their names. Children write their names vertically and develop ideas about each letter to write horizontally from each letter. Another idea would be to write acrostic poems about a 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 elicits vocabulary and thoughts about that season. For this lesson, we used spring as our topic. This exercise is great for April and Poetry month!
Planning Spring Acrostic Poems
We started our lesson by reading Everything Spring by Jill Esbaum. 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 who 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 without 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, 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 rewrote our verses on cutouts to look like rainbows. To create the same look, cut large pieces of white card stock and draw five curved lines going from one end to the other. This design creates six spaces, one 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 onto each end of the rainbow later.
After rewriting their poems in the rainbow, they trace their writing with skinny markers to match the rainbow order. Remind students beforehand of the order (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple). After tracing the words, they can use pencil crayons or crayons to color the rainbow arcs with colors to match.
After completing the writing and coloring, glue the two cloud shapes onto each rainbow’s end. This craft makes a great bulletin board display for spring! See the classroom examples below.
Hang the spring acrostic poems up overhead to create a beautiful spring display that will brighten any classroom.
Poetry Resources
Try the Spring Acrostic Poem Writing Templates
Click the image below to download and grab your FREEBIE spring acrostic poem templates today. Use these templates to write acrostic poems in a fun way this spring or during National Poetry Month!
Poetry Writing Unit
Try the Poetry Unit by Proud to be Primary. Easily teach over 20 poetry vocabulary terms and 13 different types of poetry with this all-in-one resource for teachers! Find helpful planning sheets, practice pages, engaging templates, and posters!
If you like this resource, you’ll love my poetry activity mats and poem of the week.
More Poetry Tutorials & Ideas
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Ashley
Your acrostic poems turned out beautiful! I love that you had them write their poems on a rainbow! Very creative idea!
Proud to be Primary
Thank you, Ashley! Love how they turn out as rainbows 🙂
Nancy Lewis
The rainbows are adorable and so colorful. I like the blank acrostic templates so that the kids can choose an idea of their own. Thanks! Happy Spring 🙂
Proud to be Primary
Thank you, Nancy! Hope you find them useful during your poetry activities.