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"Appreciating" poetry is not exactly a measurable skill, so I'm not sure that it is a good title. Really, the lesson needs to be chunked into smaller lessons so that you can determine if your students know how to analyze poetry.

Anytime I begin a unit on poetry, I always begin by asking students to tell me what they already know about poetry. I'm no longer surprised when I hear my students say things like "they always rhyme" or "they're always hard to understand". Then, we discuss different types of poems; we make a list of some of the poems that they like or dislike. We talk about poems that rhyme or sound "musical". We talk about poems that are sad, serious, or funny. As part of a journal entry, I have students write about how poems are a way of sharing an experience.

I also go ahead and give students their list of academic words that they're going to need to know for this unit: form, structure, free verse, lyric poetry, narrative poetry, ballads, haiku, figurative and connotative meanings of words and phrases, rhyme, repetition, and alliteration. There are many ways that you can teach these words, but for today's purposes we're going to list the words and move on to introducing this unit to the students.

I break my introduction to poetry into three separate lessons. The first lesson focuses on the structure and form of poetry. I have the students look at several poems and talk about the poems form (shape). The following poem by William Butler Yeats can serve as an example for teaching many of the elements of poetry.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Point out to students the form of this poem~three stanzas of four lines each. Students might notice that the poem does rhyme although there isn't really a definite rhythm. You'll also want to point out that this is considered free verse poem~a poem that reads just as if you were speaking it.

Here's another poem to show to students:

where you are planted

BY EVIE SHOCKLEY

he’s as high as a georgia pine, my father’d say, half laughing. southern trees

as measure, metaphor. highways lined with kudzu-covered southern trees.

fuchsia, lavender, white, light pink, purple : crape myrtle bouquets burst

open on sturdy branches of skin-smooth bark : my favorite southern trees.

one hundred degrees in the shade : we settle into still pools of humidity, moss-

dark, beneath live oaks. southern heat makes us grateful for southern trees.

the maples in our front yard flew in spring on helicopter wings. in fall, we

splashed in colored leaves, but never sought sap from these southern trees.

frankly, my dear, that’s a magnolia, i tell her, fingering the deep green, nearly

plastic leaves, amazed how little a northern girl knows about southern trees.

i’ve never forgotten the charred bitter fruit of holiday’s poplars, nor will i :

it’s part of what makes me evie :  i grew up in the shadow of southern trees.