Using Bio Poetry to Teach Research

Writing bio poetry is a great way to get students researching and interviewing. Using key details from a bio poetry template will allow students to identify the main idea of their topic.  

What is bio poetry? 

Bio poetry is a combination of a biography and poetry. The poem follows a guide to help writers research and identify key details.  The writers take notes on the person (or thing) they are writing about. They use that information to fill in the bio poetry template. 

Take a look at the template.  This bio poem asks students to learn about the person’s fears, family, and accomplishments.  

Using bio poetry in the classroom: 

Learning to take notes is an important skill. One way to help keep students from copying off the page is to use bio poems. Using this guide allows students to search for specific information.  The use of fears and loves in the bio poem makes students take the information they have learned about the person or thing and use that as a guide to think about things they would love and fear.  

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I love using the book Whoosh! Lonnie Johnson’s Super Soaking Stream of Ideas as a way to teach this lesson.  This book is about an inventor who had many inventions including the super soaker water gun.  After reading this book we can identify that he loves inventing.  We also learn that he fears failure.  These things were not explicitly told in the text, but using inference skills readers can identify these loves and fears.  

A great back to school activity is to have students write bio poetry about themselves.  This is a fun “get to know you” activity.  You can cover the photo and title and have a mystery game where students have to guess who that bio poem is about.  You can add in interview skills and let students write about another person in the class.  Using the format of the bio poem students can create interview questions. Students can record or video-tape the interview. They can then use any notes and the recorded interview to go back and write the bio poem.

Grab the FREE Bio Poetry Template in the FREE RESOURCE LIBRARY

Use bio poetry as an introduction to research skills and the famous people they study throughout the year. Give each student one person or thing to research.  They can use this research to write a bio poem on that topic. 

Bio Poetry makes an easy student work bulletin board.  Keep a wall display of these to  use all year along with images of the famous people you study. (And this is super helpful come testing time that the students have seen these people ALL YEAR LONG!)

Throughout the year, if you have a research project coming up, let students write the first draft as a bio poem. If they can write a bio poem about the topic, then they really know the thoughts, and ideas surrounding their topic.

Bio Poetry Examples

Get creative and write bio poetry examples about these topics to assess student learning.

• a consumer
• a planet
• a carnivore
• a mineral
• a fraction
• a magnet
• a character in a book
• a landformI hope these suggestions will help you get your writer’s engaged in their research. Bio Poems are great for taking the writer deeper into a topic and into the feeling and thoughts of the topic.

More Poetry Ideas:

• Assessing with Haikus, Cinquains, and Diamante. Use the other poetry templates to review standards throughout the year.  
• Ready to Print and Teach Poetry Units.  Don’t have time to plan out your poetry unit, these units have your entire unit planned out.  
• Poetry Literacy Centers.  These centers combine reading and writing standards through the use of poetry.  Students will practice reading comprehension, writing, and grammar skills.  

Want to learn more about teaching research in elementary school? Check out:

Research Journal and Graphic Organizers