Mentor Texts for Acrostic Poems

I love poetry so much that it's impossible for me to limit it to National Poetry Month or a single unit of study. Poems of all kinds are woven into the fabric of my classroom throughout the year. One of my favorite forms is acrostic poetry. These two books serve as mentor texts and usually inspire students to produce a blitz of acrostic poetry.

Silver Seeds is a perfect selection if you need a mentor text that shows how to look at ordinary things through a poet's eyes. Simple acrostic poems celebrate the wonder and beauty of the natural world. The illustrations by Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher are luminous and lovely!

Beautiful photographs by Deborah Noyes and wonderful acrostics made African Acrostics: A Word in Edgeways a must-have for our poetry shelf. Sometimes the acrostics spell the name of the animal represented in poetry, but other times the author labels the featured creature in another way. For instance, the giraffe is a cloud friend. The rhino's poem spells out Beauty In The Beast. This book is chock-full of wonderful, rich vocabulary words.