Add the last line to the poems

Add the last line to the poems:
A Clock; The beach; A Dream half-remembered; My Dog; An Old Friend; Throwing darts at the Fairground; Sitting under a Tropical tree; Looking at a Place I used to Play
This poem resource helps with a problem when teaching the writing of poetry. Students tend to find it hard to start a poem off. In my experience of teaching poetry which extends back over thirty years, I have found that once a student gets an idea or knows what she’s doing and can get ‘her teeth into it’ so to speak, then she can become creative but, the initial phase is very often a blank wall. So this exercise, which requires them to write a last line to a short poem, is designed to help ease in with the creative process as a preparation for writing their own complete poems.
Show your students the poems with the last line missing. Their task is to write just the missing last line.
The poems have a variety of subjects and all use rhyming schemes to help understand how rhyme can work. The exercises will help the students get used to using rhymes and rhythm in order to write their own lines.
The point of the exercise is to experiment and try out different things and ideas. A good tip is to read the whole poem out loud to see how the invented last line fits in.
I think it is important to encourage them to discard ideas which don’t seem to work so well and try another idea.
There are prompts provided to help the process along and completed poems with suggested last lines are provided so that examples of the finished poems can be shown.
I think your students will enjoy the fun of solving puzzles.
As an outcome the students can read their various contributions out loud and maybe a wall display could be produced with illustrations to go with their written work.
The process should act as springboard for their own poetic offerings.