Lesson Plans

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…

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…

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…

Found Poetry in Two Languages

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…

Shared Poetry Reading: Teaching Print Concepts, Rhyme, and Vocabulary

Although phonological awareness is important for early reading comprehension, other skills are equally important as students develop their reading abilities. Designed to facilitate successful early reading for kindergarten students, this lesson…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

The Tone Map

In poems, the speaker moves through a series of moods and tones of voice, arranged in a particular order, to tell an emotional story. Even when poems seem like a simple series of images and we can’t say exactly what events are taking place,…

Rap a Tap Tap – Expression through Music, Movement and Drama

This lesson can be used for students ranging from Grades 1-6 (with modifications that apply to Kindergarten and Grades 7-8). It incorporates music, dance and movement, and drama with poetry to help students learn how to portray different…

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…

Poetry Portfolios: Using Poetry to Teach Reading

Students learn to read and write when they have an active interest in what they are reading and writing about. This lesson supports students’ exploration of language skills as they read and dissect poetry. Through a weekly poem, students…

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…

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…

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…

Drawing Shakespeare’s Sonnets

These two sonnets are a great lesson in the use of metaphor, personification, and paradox—Shakespeare loves to play with figures of speech. In this exercise, students will learn about the structure of a sonnet; how to isolate imagery; how to…

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.

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…

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…

Big City Feelings

Using Poetry in Voice’s mixtape—Big City Feelings—this lesson expands on the themes expressed in Blain’s curation. Themes of identity, belonging, and urban civic life. 

Form Poetry and Memory Work

Students are often intimidated by the idea of writing form poetry, but this type of poetry can be most enjoyable to read and memorize. By first using the skills of listening, reading, and memory work to map out the structure of formal poems…

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.
• …

Sonic Patterns: Exploring Poetic Techniques through Close Reading

In addition to developing background knowledge about allusions and the etymology of key words, students use an online tool to examine the relationship between the speaker and his father in Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” Then students…

Using our Online Writing Workshop in the Classroom

This lesson provides ideas for teachers and librarians who want to incorporate our month-long, online, poetry workshop into your classroom’s daily routine. Students will be building their own writer’s notebooks and experimenting with writing and…

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,…

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…

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…

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’.…

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 (…

Belonging

Belonging is a feeling we all seek. The questions: How do we belong? Where do we belong? Who makes us feel like we belong? What do we need to remember and what made us forget? Where and what is home? are important questions…

Erasure Poems

Sometimes limiting our choices inspires incredibly creative results. This writing exercise will give your students the chance to find their own voices while working with a block of text written by someone else.

Erasures are fun, but…

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…

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…

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…