Lesson Plans

Exploring How Poets Walk the Line

This lesson plan aims to inspire students to understand how a place, new or familiar, can spark a poem – contemporary and classic. Each student will have the opportunity to write a poem and read it to the group, as well as research and select a…

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…

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.
• …

Found Poetry in Two Languages

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…

Ekphrasis: Using Art to Inspire Poetry

In this lesson, students explore ekphrasis—writing inspired by art. Students begin by reading and discussing several poems inspired by works of art. Through the discussion, students learn ways in which poets can approach a piece of artwork (for…

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…

Bilingual Glosas

A glosa is a poem that organizes itself around four lines borrowed from another poem. A form invented in Spain in the fifteenth century, the glosa begins with the borrowed four lines set off as an epigraph. The poet then writes four stanzas of…

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…

Poetic Fortunes

One of the wonderful things about poetry is its ability to be both specific and generous at the same time. Remarkably, it seems that the more specific a poem becomes --  the more it roots itself in a place, time…

Scenes

The purpose of the lesson is to use poems to create short theatrical scenes in which heightened language would be placed in a dramatic context. Each student is responsible for the full realization of her chosen vision: designing, casting,…

Writing Poetry: Teamwork and Play 1

These workshops focus on reading simple but unique poems that embody the idea of play in various ways, and on group/individual writing in a spirit of exploration and spontaneity.

​​IMPORTANT: All these exercises (with the…

Pick a Perfect Poem to Perform

Students will read widely and deeply a variety of poetry from a poetry anthology. Students will develop an appreciation for variations and complexities in content, structure, theme, and overall effectiveness of individual poems. Students will…

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…

Afterwords : The Beauty That Lies Beside

The whole purpose is to tear down whatever is cliché and words that don’t lead to a concept but to an overused social rule, by exposing the students to the concrete reality, to the truly scalable, sizeable and perceivable object, to cold, hard…

Finding the Heart in Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”

In Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” he uses rhyme, meter, repetition, assonance, and other rhetorical and poetic devices to capture the emotional historical moment in the United States of America after Lincoln’s assassination.…

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…

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…

Being One Inch Tall

Opening our students’ minds and having them see the world from different perspectives can have a positive impact on their lives. Through Shel Silverstein’s “One Inch Tall”, this unit allows students to imagine what the world would be like if…

Occasional Poetry: Amanda Gorman on the Occasion of an Inauguration

In this lesson, students learn about the poet Amanda Gorman — how she came to write “The Hill We Climb” for President Joe Biden’s inauguration and how her poem was written in the tradition of occasional poetry. Students will also learn about Ms…

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’.…

Intergenerational Love

This lesson plan will provide an opportunity to explore the idea of intergenerational love through poetry, allowing students to connect to their own positive attributes while recognizing that these are a combination of the generations of family…

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…

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…

Poetry is the Power to Transcend

Poet W.H. Auden said, “Poetry makes nothing happen” – implying that poetry is useless to real life. This opinion is common, and many people – including students – think, “Why should I bother with poetry? I can’t get a job out of it. It can’t help…

The Response Poem

There is a long tradition in poetry of poets writing in response to work that has inspired them, borrowing a line from one poem to begin or end a new poem. In this way, poets may re-contextualize a particularly vivid verse while essentially…

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…

Strategies for Teaching Poetry to High School Students

Poetry In Voice Analysis

For this project, you will explore and analyze the poem you have selected for the Poetry In Voice Contest. Ensure that this poem challenges, upsets, enriches, frightens, puzzles, and/or emboldens you.

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…

Swish! Pow! Whack! Teaching Onomatopoeia through Sports Poetry

Students explore different poems written about sports by reading and listening, looking closely at the use of onomatopoeia in each piece. After a discussion of the poems, students view a segment of a sporting event and generate a list of sounds…

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…

Stretching the Imagination with Imagery

Oftentimes, poetry is viewed as an intimidating, confusing, or difficult genre to read and write in—however, sometimes a poem can be best recognized and understood by what it leaves behind in our mind: images. 

From a classic red…

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…

Somewhere Today

Students are always learning about environmental issues, as well as, equality and inequality throughout the curriculum. Whether it is through units in Science (Wildlife& Ecosystems, Ocean Health, Air Pollution, Climate Change, Weather…

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…

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…

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…