Five Children’s Poetry Books with Free Teaching Resources
National Poetry Day falls on the first Thursday in October (2nd of October in 2025), and what better way to celebrate than by making some noise with words? This year’s theme is ‘Play’, giving us a brilliant opportunity to celebrate the sheer fun and inventiveness of poetry.
We know that in the busy school calendar, finding time to plan engaging activities can be tricky. That’s why we’ve looked across our poetry booklists, chosen with the help of our expert panel, and selected five highly recommended poetry books that also feature free, ready-to-use, downloadable teaching resources.
Whether you’re after Michael Rosen’s playful rhymes in Ready for Spaghetti for your youngest children, a collection exploring emotional literacy for KS1, Brian Moses’s fun poems in On Poetry Street for lower KS2, or a powerful verse novel like Run, Rebel for secondary students, we’ve matched a recommended poetry choice to each key stage and included download links to the free teaching notes available to support your planning.
Here are five excellent poetry books with resources, each matched to an age group, to help you bring the joy and power of verse into your classroom this Poetry Day and beyond….
5 Poetry Books with Downloadable Teaching Notes
1. Ready for Spaghetti by Michael Rosen & Polly Dunbar
(Our choice for EYFS)
Michael Rosen is a master of the word. He is a master of rhythm and rhyme and a master of the engagement of young children. Ready for Spaghetti is a book full of poems specifically aimed at the youngest children. It recognises that enabling children to hear and feel words in an enjoyable and engaging way, is not just a foundational skill for learning to read and write, but a fundamental entitlement for all children to be able to be introduced to the joy of playing with words.
The poems and rhymes in Ready for Spaghetti follow the loose structure of a child’s day from the rhyme “Up” at the start to “Goodnight” at the end. In between come rhymes that can accompany all sorts of activities, such as “On the swings” and feelings, like the rhyme “Happy”.
The rhymes are simple and easily recalled, but the joy for the child will also be in the illustrations by Polly Dunbar. Pictures of children illustrate each rhyme – my particular favourite is the illustration of the child putting on her pyjamas to accompany the rhyme, “Jimmy Jams”. The playfulness of the collection makes it a perfect choice for this year’s National Poetry Day theme.
A popular choice from our Primary Poetry booklist and Preschool Recommended Booklists, Children will quickly know their favourites and, in no time, will be reading along with the adult. Ready for Spaghetti is 
a brilliant choice for younger classes to celebrate Poetry Day, to celebrate language fun and to celebrate the joy of the everyday.
A comprehensive set of teaching notes is available to download for free. The teaching resources include cross-curricular ideas around the poems, and teachers looking for activities around one or two of the poems to enjoy on National Poetry Day will find this a very useful resource. An additional activity resource to support storytelling fun with the book is also available.
Purchase Ready for Spaghetti from Amazon or BookShop.
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2. An Emotional Menagerie by The School of Life
(Our choice for KS1)
An Emotional Menagerie is a beautiful collection of poems, all themed around different emotional states, featured on the KS1 section of our Primary Poetry recommended booklist and also our list of Year 2 recommended reads
Working through the alphabet (Anger, Boredom, Curiosity and so on), each feeling is likened to an animal and starts with the line ‘If ….were an animal’, helping children to identify the words we use to describe emotional states and how the feelings might cause people to behave or react.
The bright illustrations help children to link the emotions and their paired animal. Anger is compared to a lion, boredom is a limp jellyfish, obsession to an otter and zeal to busy, working ants. Children will have loads of fun creating their own comparisons while playing with the words and rhythms to match.
A comprehensive resource pack is also available to download for free from the publisher, which contains discussion points and activities based on a number of the poems with a focus on emotional literacy.
An Emotional Menagerie is a lovely book to help develop emotional literacy. We recommend this as a great addition to book collections in schools and homes. Teachers can dip in and out for shorter sessions, picking one or two of the poems to enjoy at a time.
Purchase An Emotional Menagerie from Amazon or BookShop.
3. On Poetry Street by Brian Moses & Mark Elvins
(Our choice for lower KS2)
On Poetry Street provides 52 poems, one for each week of the year.
The book begins with Brian Moses welcoming readers with a ‘simple test’ for seeing whether they are ‘hooked on words’ and can create poetry for themselves. He then invites readers to ‘walk down poetry street’ with him, introducing them to the spectacular range of poems ahead.
In this collection, the opportunities for writing poetry or engaging children in oracy opportunities are endless. There is so much playfulness and creativity on each page. This collection of poems feels to be written with fun at its centre, while also providing scaffolding for budding poets to write their own.
A downloadable resource is available from the publisher, with poetry lessons for KS2 based on 5 of the poems from the collection. For National Poetry Day, we like the fifth lesson, which is based on a poem called “If I had Ears the Size of Satellite Dishes…”, and involves an imaginative exercise in which children innovate their own poems about super-powered bodies. The emphasis is on playfulness with language and imaginative ideas – perfect for the 2025 theme of Play for National Poetry Day.
You can see why Brian Moses is one of Britain’s favourite children’s poets. A must for every classroom bookshelf or for a teacher to keep on their desk to read aloud and inject the joy of poetry into the classroom every day. On Poetry Street book features on our Year 4 Recommended Reads list and will also be enjoyed across the whole of Key Stage 2.
Purchase On Poetry Street from Amazon or BookShop.
4. Let’s Chase Stars Together by Matt Goodfellow
(Our choice for upper KS2 and lower KS3)
Many readers will be familiar with Matt Goodfollow‘s poetry from the outstanding verse novels The Final Year and The First Year, and will perhaps also know some of his primary poetry collections like Bright Bursts of Colour or Caterpillar Cake. This collection, Let’s Chase Stars Together, is suitable for the top end of primary and the lower end of secondary, and features a range of poems capturing relatable moments in growing up. Poetry has a way of capturing moments in time and replaying the depth of emotions in that moment, which this collection exemplifies perfectly.
The strapline under the title Let’s Chase Stars Together really sets the tone for this beautifully considered collection. It states ‘Poems to Lose Yourself In’ and it is clear that each poem is designed carefully to let the reader settle back and immerse themselves in the overwhelming power and comfort, ebbs and flows, calm and chaos of verse.
This collection from the Upper KS2 section of our Primary Poetry booklist would offer value to classrooms in a multitude of ways. There are poems which are just so pertinent and thought-provoking that it would be a shame not to have them linger with a class, possibly at the start or end of a challenging day (a personal favourite is ‘I am Here’). For KS2 classes, there is a range of genres to enable class teachers to inspire poetry of all types, and so can be used as the stimulus for whole-class writing.
As a PSHE resource, Matt Goodfellow has considered some huge issues in Let’s Chase Stars Together, such as the transition to high school (Transition), Domestic Violence (Jake) and the death of a beloved pet (Dig Sid, Dig) and some which may overwhelm the reader more than the listener- I dare you not to be moved by ‘Adequate Life’.
Let’s Chase Stars Together is a wonderful anthology and, for a mature Upper KS2 group or lower KS3, a perfect addition to a class bookshelf or teacher resource collection. The free teaching notes provided by Bloomsbury feature a sequence of learning activities to help pupils engage with the poems and explore their themes.
Purchase Let’s Chase Stars Together from Amazon or Bookshop.
5. Run, Rebel by Manjeet Mann
(Our choice for KS3 and KS4)
Our choice for secondary students, Manjeet Mann’s award-winning verse novel Run, Rebel is a powerful and appealing poetry choice that tackles challenging themes. Verse novels have seen a rise in popularity in recent years, and you will find them featured among our booklists, including a special KS2 verse novel list and a verse novel section on our new KS3 poetry booklist.
Run, Rebel earned a place on our recently published Year 9 Recommended Reads list. The story centres on a gifted teenage athlete called Amber whose passion for running and desire for independence are stifled by the tyranny of her abusive, alcoholic father. As the women in her family struggle under patriarchal control, Amber finds inspiration in reading about revolutionary history, prompting a journey towards empowerment.
The accessible verse novel format appeals to students as it presses play on a faster pace, distils complex emotions clearly and provides a less intimidating reading experience than traditional prose. 
This empathetic and important book is ideal for more mature readers in Year 9 and above. Run, Rebel covers themes of family dynamics, the benefits of sport, the complexities of domestic abuse, revolution and self-discovery.
Several free teaching resources are available. Lit in Colour has produced resource packs for KS3 and KS4, including PowerPoint presentations with a series of activities and videos. A Carnegies Shadowing resource is also still available from the book’s Carnegie Medal shortlisting in 2021, and can be accessed here.
Purchase Run, Rebel from Amazon or BookShop.
You can see our full selection of primary poetry recommendations here, and a school book pack is available via Peters. You can also look out for our brand new list of Poetry Books for KS3, coming this week.
More booklists you might like:
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Where next?
- Visit our Reading for Pleasure Hub
- Browse our Topic Booklists
- View our Year Group Recommended Read Booklists.
- See our Books of the Month.