Lesson Plans

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Romanticism

It has been said that in 1816 Lord Byron rented a house in Geneva, “Villa Diodati” where he, Percy Byshe Shelley, and Mary Shelley met. They spent the summer together, and over a period of 3 days of rain they were forced to remain inside. In…

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…

Poetry from Prose

Students compose found and parallel poems based on a descriptive passage they have chosen from a piece of literature they are reading. They first work in small groups to brainstorm words to describe concrete objects and then arrange their words…

Earth Verse: Using Science in Poetry

This lesson is a great way to teach both scientific and English content to a class, although the teacher can easily choose another book and subject area. In this lesson, students listen to poems in the book Science Verse by Jon…

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 bilingual…

Slipping, Sliding, Tumbling: Reinforcing Cause and Effect through Diamante Poems

Combine higher order thinking with creativity in this lesson that uses diamante poems to illustrate the phenomenon of cause and effect. Students define and identify instances of cause and effect to help them generate their own examples. After…