Printable Blackout poem worksheet for Years 5–6

Take the printed page below. Circle words that pull at you, then black out everything else. The surviving words, in order, are the poem. You may not add or reorder words.

Blackout poetry (also called erasure) starts from somebody else's page. Students circle words that pull at them, then black out everything else; the surviving words, in their original order, are the poem. Nothing may be added or rearranged. That strictness is exactly why it works in a classroom: the blank page problem disappears, and every decision is a reading decision. Before any marker touches paper, teach annotation — verbs in one colour, images in another — so students read the page as writers, hunting what it can be made to say. Rule of the first lesson: pencil first, marker second, because the poem changes as you black out and early commitments are usually wrong. Expect the first attempts to keep too much. The editing conversation is the curriculum: each further blackout is a revision, and students can defend every survivor. Source pages matter. Start with plain prose — a textbook page, a news article — and move to a public-domain classic later, where keeping one of the author's lines intact inside a new poem teaches quotation better than any worksheet on referencing.

Teaching this at Years 5–6

What changes at this level: Eight writing lines, one short paragraph as source, exactly seven words to keep. Circling before blacking out is compulsory.

For Years 5–6 use a source page with big, friendly vocabulary — a page about animals or weather from a class reader. The seven-word limit is the lesson: read it aloud in pairs before any blacking out, because a seven-word poem that sounds wrong in the mouth will look wrong on the page. Display tip: photograph pages before and after; the class sees its own editing, which makes revision visible and concrete.

Worked example: From a page about tides

the moon
keeps accounts
of every shore —
nothing
is forgiven,
everything
returns

Seven kept phrases from a science page, re-lineated. The source explained tides; the poem is about debt and forgiveness. Show students that 'in order' is the only rule that survived — line breaks, which cost nothing, did all the poetic work.

What a worksheet looks like

Theme drawn for this sample: the sea. 8 writing lines. Tasks, in the order this sample drew them:

Find a poem of exactly seven words hiding in the page.
Keep at least one verb and one image from the page.
Make a second poem from the same page by choosing different words.

Your download draws a new theme and task order, so no two students need get the same sheet.

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