Lesson Plans

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…

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’.…

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.…

Nature as a Portal Into Mystery

A generative workshop about the place of unknowing we begin from when we write poetry - letting the words lead us, letting ourselves flow into the magic of the first draft. This lesson includes various short warm-up exercises, a discussion of one…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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: Teamwork and Play 2

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Poetry Snapshots: Using Images to Get the Big Idea

Using the definition that image poetry uses “concrete things to describe abstract ideas”, this lesson begins with the idea of haiku as “poetry snapshots”; images of one idea, in three lines. Students begin as “poetry detectives” and investigate…

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…

Multipurpose Poetry: Introducing Science Concepts and Increasing Fluency

Poetry can be a fun and unintimidating way for ESL students to develop their oral fluency. In this lesson, students discuss what they know about poetry and then work in small groups to develop a choral reading of two poems about an assigned…

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…

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 poetry is to them in their own words. Invite students to express their own views on poetry by…

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…

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 …

A Race with Grace: Sports Poetry in Motion

Can athletes’ moves be described as beautiful? How are grace, beauty, and aesthetics expressed through movement? These and many other questions will provide the framework for students’ exploration of poetry in motion of athletes who participate…

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…

Poetic Resilience

What is poetry’s superpower?  Its ability to save, heal and empower those who are drawn to its possibilities. In this lesson students will listen to Nehiyaw, Dené and Métis spoken word artist Zoey Roy’s personal account of how poetry…

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…

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…

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…

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…