Teaching Cinquain Poems

What is a Cinquain Poem?

Teaching cinquain poems are great option for focusing on word choice. Writer’s aren’t limited to syllables in this style of poetry, so they can choose words they really love! On top of that you, can assess understanding of parts of speech, and synonyms.

Cinquains are also a great way to assess vocabulary and topics in science and social studies. You can see how they grasp a concept with the words they choose.

Planning Cinquain Poems

I like to start Cinquains by showing them the template. You can grab the template in the FREE RESOURCE LIBRARY. (This download also has templates for haikus, diamante, and bio-poems)

Then have the writers choose the nouns, verbs, and adjectives by writing them on a Cinquain Planning Guide. This guide allows writers to collect all the words they can think of for the topic and select the best ones. Added bonus – you can sneak in a review of using a thesaurus into this lesson. Using a thesaurus is a great way to help writers work on word choice for their cinquain poems.

Mystery Cinquain Bulletin Board

Create a mystery cinquain bulletin board where student have to use the words in the poem to determine the title. Challenge the students to make the word choice so strong that readers know the topic of the poem without seeing it.

Cover the title and first noun of the poem and let other students guess the main idea of the poem.

Don’t forget to grab the free poetry templates in the FREE RESOURCE LIBRARY

Check these ideas for using Haikus to assess student understanding.

Happy Writing!

More Poetry Resources:

• Free 30-Day Poetry Challenge
• 2nd Grade Poetry Unit
• 3rd Grade Poetry Unit
• 4th/5th Grade Poetry Unit
• Poetry Vocabulary Book
• Digital Poetry Portfolio