This study explores the use of design technology to teach a unit on poetry in a fifth grade class. The main goals of the poetry unit were to develop students' abilities to use their own creative voices to express themselves and to write descriptive poetry that creates detailed images for the reader. This unit was implemented in a fifth grade class and the teacher's goal was to teach the poetry unit while exposing the students to engineering design and the iterative process. This process required students to think about and visualize objects in three dimensions. Design technology became a vehicle for creative expression that is not usually associated with the teaching and learning of poetry. This study lends support to the idea that integrating design technology and language arts may be a way to improve student achievement.