Lesson Plans

Developing Oral Language and Vocabulary through Poetry

In this unit I have noted variations for students in grades three to grade seven. There are many ways you can begin but here is an example that has worked with my class. You will find a list of resources I have used for ideas about slam poetry…

Identity and Self-Discovery through Poetry

This lesson is inspired by Denise Clark’s work with her senior English students at Vancouver Technical Secondary School in Vancouver, British Columbia.

People often write about what they know best, and in many cases, writers give us…

Unrequited Love Poems

Tired of trite imagery and sickly sweet words on Valentine's Day? Let's stomp on that box of chocolates! By creating an iMovie storyboard of a poem with pencil sketches, this mini-unit helps students SLOW down their recitation, learn a poem by…

Understanding Lyric Poetry

To demonstrate how various poetic techniques, such as rhyme, rhythm, diction, and repetition contribute to the effect and meaning of a lyric poem.

This lesson would take place following the study of a number of lyric poems and the…

5, 6, 7, 8… Let’s Go Alliterate!

Alliteration is a fun way to get younger students exposed to poetry. Having students play with words that start with the same letter is a great addition to Early Literacy. It’s a fun and less formal way to teach students about naming words (…

Exploring Extended Metaphor and Irony through Rejection

Many famous writers have stories about rejection letters. William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies was called “Rubbish & Dull. Pointless. Reject” in a note scrawled over the cover of his manuscript. About his novel, Moby Dick…

Speaker & Mover 1: Listening, Mirroring

One way of allowing students to become less self-conscious about public speaking is to give them a task that focuses them on something other than the sound of their own voices in front of people. This exercise concretizes the idea of ‘intention…

Acrostic Fun!

Students will be introduced to acrostic poems in this lesson, as a way to ease them into poetry writing. The thought of writing poetry tends to intimidate some students. We want them to feel confident and comfortable in writing simple poems as…

Literary Parodies: Exploring a Writer’s Style through Imitation

The popular saying “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” coined by Charles Caleb Colton, is the basis for this lesson, which asks students to analyze the features of a poet’s work then create their own poems based on the original model…

Tied to the Land

The strong connection Indigenous communities have with the land is a prevalent theme in Katherena Vermette’s collection of poems titled river woman. In this lesson, students will analyze the language Vermette uses to create a sensory…

Writing Poetry with Rebus and Rhyme

If you’ve ever drawn a heart for the word “love,” you’ve written a rebus. Rebus, writing which substitutes images for words in the text, is used by authors to write books for young readers able to identify only a limited number of words, so why…

Teaching Similes and Metaphors through Chips

I created this lesson over 20 years ago as part of my Action Research at OISE. This is a fun, engaging, and highly interactive method to teach and reinforce Simile and Metaphor. This lesson has been highly successful through the years and is…

The Raven

This is an introduction to “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe through recitation and drama. It begins with a recitation by the teacher with the students finishing each verse either individually or as a class. The class is divided into groups of 3…

The Poetry Video

There is a great tradition of combining poetry and film: the twentieth-century French poet, artist, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau was particularly interested in using the medium of the moving image to explore new ways to create and celebrate…

Horror Explorer

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore*... I decided to write a really scary poem!

Creepy, freaky and downright weird. In these lessons students create…

Poetry for Two Voices: Reading, Writing and Performing

Using poets Phil Kaye and Sarah Kay’s YouTube performance of “When Love Arrives” as an inspiration, students will perform and write comparison poems for two voices. After a discussion of the unique structure of these poems, students will choose…

What Is Poetry?

An excellent way to gauge student attitudes towards and experiences with poetry is to begin your poetry unit by asking students to define what…

Building Classroom Community through the Exploration of Acrostic Poetry

Building classroom community is one of the most challenging yet most important tasks for any teacher, and it needs to be reinforced frequently throughout the year. This lesson gives students the opportunity to be innovative, creative, and…

Letter Poems Deliver: Experimenting with Line Breaks in Poetry Writing

Letter poems are a particularly apt medium for exploring a defining characteristic of poetry—line breaks. As students work to transform narrative-style letters into poetic format, they are forced to think carefully about where to end each line…

Poems for Two Voices

I’ve used this lesson with grades 8–10, but mostly with grade 9.

A two-voice poem is written in two columns. Two students read the poem, and each chooses a column to read. When there are words that appear on the same line, the students…

Old & New Thinking

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Styles may transform over time, along with social mores, laws and priorities and even the standards by which we treat one another across cultures and genders and generations. But the ways…

Writing poems using literal translations of common expressions

A second language, or translation, can be the spark that shows us our own language anew. This, in a wider sense, is what poetry does. 

This lesson will look at playful use of language + translation (including…

The Ballad

To many students, the word “ballad” will call to mind a slow, probably sentimental song. In the world of poetry, however, a ballad is a lively storytelling poem written in what is called the ballad stanza.

The ballad stanza is simple to…

Living Poetry

 There are many advantages to be found in studying and reciting poetry:

• Poetry offers examples of mastery of language and stocks the mind with images and ideas expressed in unforgettable words and phrases.
• …

Character vs. Self

When developing a character, the actor will employ an approach that moves forward on two fronts: The first is to make an external study of the character, observing people in the world around to make choices that are within our capacity to mimic…

Speaker & Mover 2: Advanced

There is a genre of theatre, inspired by classical traditions in many countries (China, India, Japan, Bali) and pioneered in Poland and throughout Europe in the sixties and seventies, known as ‘physical theatre’ and sometimes ‘third theatre’.…

The Cento, or Collage Poem

This writing exercise will encourage students to pay attention to how poems work at a line-by-line level. Students will mine many source poems for individual lines and create their own poem by collaging these lines into a unique sequence.

Watch Your Language

Language is a fundamentally human phenomenon and an ability that distinguishes us as a species on the planet. Language has also been a profoundly divisive issue between us. The goal of this lesson is to create awareness and understanding about…

Talking Poetry with Blabberize

In this lesson students are given the opportunity to be imaginative and expressive through the writing of three types of poems:  acrostic, diamante, and theme.  Building on their creativity, students then use …

Poetry from Science!

Poetry and science are not usually things that we put together in the same sentence, let alone the same lesson at school. But there are many reasons why we should! Science, even when it adheres to rigorous methods, is a creative process, and…

Dialogue Roulette

Dramatic texts can be created out of source material that was never intended for use as such: newspaper articles, political speeches, song lyrics, and lines of poetry. Just as poetic text can be made from found material (‘found poetry’), just…

Just Act Natural: Poetry and Play

What a poem does on the page and what it does aloud can be two very different things. Since the recital audience does not read but only listens, some of a poem’s more visually formal conventions should be deemphasized in the early stages of…

Canada in 2016

In this lesson, students will be invited to annotate Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “England in 1819” with questions, comments, and connections (preferably on a whiteboard/smart board where the poem is projected, for a collaborative process.) Through…

Found Poetry in Two Languages

How to DISRUPT your poem: A deep reading method to ignite the interpretive process

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Group Challenge: Preparing Students for a Team Recitation Contest

In this unit, students will be introduced to the art of recitation through a group challenge. In groups of three, students will select, prepare, and perform one poem each. Their scores will then be tallied with their teammates. In the spirit of…

Indigenous Poets

Reconciliation cannot take place before awareness, and the feelings of commonality and connection. Reading poetry by Indigenous poets, such as Liz Howard and Alootook Ipellie, we can grow in our awareness of the lives and issues faced by…

A Taste of Canada

Students in grades 4-6 often do a study of Canada. In Grades 4 and 5 for example, students explore the different regions of Canada in Social Studies. They often do an in-depth study of the landforms, physical characteristics of different…