Try this simple warm activity to bring some creativity into your classroom.

Ask your students if there are any poets in the class and then explain that they are going to be writing a poem titled "You".  The first step is to get the students thinking of someone who they either really love or that they really hate.  Explain that they must have very strong emotions towards this person but not to worry as no-one in the class needs to know who it is.

Next write up on the board eight lines beginning "You are....". This is the structure of your poem.  Beside one of the lines, write up (a type of food).  Ask the students to imagine their person as a type of food and elicit some examples.  You may have to give an example to get them started, ie. "You are a strawberry ice-cream." Once the students get the idea, write up next to each line of the poem a topic you'd like them to imagine their person as, ie. a type of furniture, a type of transport, a colour, a month of the year, etc.  Offer some examples of your own to the students.

Once you have the students writing out their poems, explain to them that because poems come "straight from the heart" they are read with lots of emotion.  Ask them to imagine how they feel when they read each line of the poem and ask them to write down the emotion next to it.  Again the secret is to offer some examples of your own and act it out, ie. "You are a thunderstorm!" ANGER.  Read out you examples putting as much over-acting into the lines as possible.  The students will love it and it'll break the ice for them before they have to read out their poems.

Finally, after checking for any errors in the poems, get the students to read them out.  Encourage the students to put as much emotion as possible (and possibly actions) into their readings as they can.  The result is usely a lot of hilarity for all!  The best thing about this activity is that it is very simple and great for mixed level classes as they stronger students can make more of their poems by adding adjectives, compound adjectives and so-on and the weaker ones can keep it fairly simple.  So try it out.