Acrostics are fun and help you focus on a topic in a wonderfully new, personal, and creative way. So boost your imagination and make your brain love to learn using these flexible learning tools. Creating a piece of acrostic poetry is a very effective method of really engaging students in the learning process. Acrostic poems consist of a composition of sentences in which the initial letter spells out a particular word or phrase. An acrostic poem, therefore, could consist of four lines, the first beginning with the letter ‘L’, the second ‘O’, the third ‘V’, and the fourth ‘E’. Hopefully this would be an acrostic poem about some aspect of love. Beautiful poetry can be created in this way on any number of subjects.
Acrostic poetry writing can be a wonderful learning exercise as students focus creatively on the nature of their subject. What could be an appropriate theme for the creation of acrostic poetry? Here are some suggestions:
1) An acrostic for a name: a student’s own name or the name of a famous person: Mom, Grandma, Dad, Grandpa, Jesus, Shakespeare, Washington, Einstein, Da Vinci, Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Christopher Columbus , Martin Luther King. Acrostics for names make fantastic and emotional or funny notes for birthdays and special occasions of people you love.
2) Acrostics for organizations: UN, NASA, Shell, McDonald’s, BP, WalMart. Whether you want to make a political or promotional statement or just amuse your friends, creating an acrostic out of company letters can be a great way to get noticed.
3) Acrostics for positive words: ace, adore, dynamic, energy, effervescence, fresh, magical, munch, paradise, plum, soft, solar, spicy, strong, tasty, confidence, vital, enthusiasm, peace. A beautiful way to give yourself a boost of positivity is to generate a poem using a positive word as a base: you will focus on this word as you make your poem and your brain will react accordingly: you will naturally become more positive as you do so. create your poem
4) An acrostic poem for a place of interest, eg Pyramids, Venice, New York, London, Stonehenge, America, Europe, England, USA, Sydney, Canada, Moon, stars, Pacific, Nile, Mississippi. An excellent method to create synergies between the important aspects of a place. As with all of these suggestions, it might be interesting to consider the 5 W questions about who, what, where, when and why; Who were the Aztecs? What happened at Stonehenge? Where is the Mississippi? When is the brightest moon? Why were the pyramids built?
5) Acrostics of beautiful things: flower, love, family, son, wife, husband, land, sea, forest, images, stars, Internet, talk, share, snow. The stuff of wonderful poetry for hundreds of years!
6) An acrostic poem of actions: play, draw, sleep, jog, walk, want, try, succeed, help. Focusing on what you hope to gain or the important features of doing a particular thing, an acrostic poem using the required verb as a base might just do the trick.
7) Acrostic poems for special times: Christmas, Mother’s Day, Easter, Spring, Autumn, Summer, Winter, five in the morning, afternoon.
8) Acrostic poems for feelings or ways of being: capable, happy, brave, confident, determined, delighted, anxious, energetic, excited, happy, playful. An effective form of therapy could be to explore your feelings related to a particular sphere of emotion. Once again, the W can be useful: What makes you happy? Where are you most excited? When are you full of joy?
These are all very attractive acrostic themes, and you can certainly imagine many more; One of the reasons why poets, word freaks, crossword hackers, puzzle lovers, and students and teachers of all stripes love acrostics. When you generate an acrostic poem, you can clarify your theme by emphasizing the initial letters that explain the theme, or you can choose not to, by being coy about your acrostic poem or perhaps by stitching your hidden word or phrase into the second letter of each line. . You may want to use just one word per line – you can use a beautifully constructed, complete sentence, or even an entire paragraph.
Acrostic poetry can be formal or informal, many people take it very seriously: elements of poetry composition, such as the use of iambic pentameters, etc., can just as easily be applied within the structure of a acrostic. Less formally, some poets use the form to play and relax; many use it to produce personalized and loving messages. Partly because of the flexible nature of acrostic poetry, it is often chosen by teachers to introduce students to the joy of writing while providing a restrictive, practical structure; the skeleton, so to speak, that students can develop and create something delicious; or a creative monster! Children, of course, love to generate acrostics, and often do so with great style.
Acrostic poetry has been generated for centuries to spell out religious messages and useful knowledge to know and meditate on; it is even cited in relation to the origin of symbolizing Jesus Christ with the image of a fish. The reasoning behind this relates to storytelling: a certain structure of a story helps us understand, remember and remember, and storytelling is something humans are very talented at and have been for some time.
In short, acrostics provide a great way to think about and present a topic creatively. Acrostics can be applied to abstract concepts or failing that, they can be usefully generated for names, organizations, positive words, places of interest, beautiful things in general, actions, special times (Christmas acrostics and Mother’s Day acrostics). Spring and Winter and race to feelings. Acrostics can be used in puzzles and acrostic games and generating acrostics is a great creativity enabler and brain expander as well as being a really fun educational tool. Many pleasant hours await the creator of acrostic poems!
