Designed to help students respond in a positive way to poetry, poetry theater integrates dramatic technique with various aspects of reading, writing, analyzing, and reciting poetry. Poetry theater presentations require approximately five class periods to complete, allowing 45 minutes per class. The first class period should be devoted to choral reading. In this period, the class should be familiarized with the techniques of choral reading and then broken into groups of five or six students. Each group then creates a presentation of the same poem used with the entire class. The second class session should be devoted to the discussion of themes for a presentation, finding poems related to the theme chosen; selecting lines, phrases, or words from those poems to use in the presentation; deciding on the final order of the poem to be presented; assigning specific lines to people in the group; determining appropriate movements and voice levels; and practicing. The third and fourth class sessions should involve refinement of the presentation, and the last session is the presentation itself. In addition to providing positive experiences with poetry, poetry theater gives students valuable group work experiences and helps them to become more creative. (FL)