This teaching resource is designed to engage early years learners with these cute family and culture poetry prompt task cards. These cultural poetry prompts are perfect for increasing literacy skills, recognising culture and teaching intercultural awareness. You can also use them for HASS learning to foster a sense of community and an understanding of the holidays and practices of diverse groups of people. Children can choose from any of these 16 illustrated poetry task cards and write a short rhyming poem about their family members or about cultural holidays or events, including:

• Mum
• Dad
• Brother
• Sister
• Nan
• Pop
• Easter
• New Year’s Eve
• St Valentine’s Day
• Diwali
• Eid-al-Fitr
• Hanukkah
• Birthdays
• Australia Day/Guy Fawkes Night (UK)/ Independence Day (US)
• St Patrick’s Day
• Anzac Day/Remembrance Day (UK)/Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (US)

Although the cards contain simple rhyming phrases designed to assist children from Foundation to Year 3 who are learning how to repeat or combine text to form rhyming couplets, you might also like to remind children that they are welcome to write any other type of poem if they wish and that not all poetry must rhyme. Why not set them the task of writing haiku, acrostic, concrete or freeform poetry on the same topic, to round out their poetry writing skills?