Choice Lit Topic: Poetry
We all need more poetry in our lives, and time spent with poems in classrooms is what many students carry away and cherish years after they’ve left our schools. Here are resources to help you bring more of the delights of poetry into your classroom and school.
Results
Why High School Students Need Cardboard Castles and Poetry Caves
This past spring my high school students and I built a cave in our classroom. It was made out of cardboard boxes, kraft paper, and a lot of packing tape...
Rhyme and Reflect: Fostering Fluency Through Poetry
Introduction As children learn to read, their decoding skills strengthen step-by-step. Some readers take to it like a duck to water and read smoothly with expression. Their oral reading matches...
Love Poetry: Take It or Leave It, but Tell Me Why
If you work with adolescents, you know that they are prone to quick, extreme judgments, throwing out proclamations of love and hate left and right. At the beginning of the...
A Poetic Beginning
It is no easy task for students to jump back into writing at the start of the school year after taking a summer hiatus. I used to ask students to...
Informational Poetry
A primary teacher, deep into an informational writing unit, wondered how to bring new enthusiasm into the unit. These primary students loved the poetry and songs that were often embedded...
Step Into Poetry: Building a Poetry-Conscious Classroom
Poetry has been a part of my life since I was a little girl listening to my mother and father recite poetry. I loved the sound of the words and...
Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month
Poetry is something that has grown on me over the years. In high school, I didn’t get much exposure to it beyond a poem or two that I might have...
Poetry Friday Stretches Into Poetry Slam
For years in my classroom, we have started every Friday by reading poetry. Poetry Friday is an idea that we've shared for quite a while. The students arrive and settle...
Poetry Strategies for Partners and Groups
Because of its personal nature, writing poetry is usually a solitary activity. But a fun and energetic alternative is to write poems with a partner or a whole group. In...
Weekly Poetry Responses for Secondary Students
This PD2Go focuses on giving secondary students an opportunity to respond to poetry each week.
Three Ways to Engage Your Students in Reading and Writing Poetry This Spring
I don’t think it’s an accident that National Poetry Month falls in the spring. After spending so much time inside during the winter, being able to spend more time outdoors...
Poetry Surprises
Fridays in our classroom start with poetry. The first few students in the room grab a tub or make a stack of poetry books from the classroom library and place...
Making Time for Poetry
I grew up in a small town, and although it was a wonderful place to experience childhood, there wasn’t a lot there. If we wanted to go to the zoo,...
Poems to Start the Year
Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. —Robert Frost Last year I had a student who had such anxiety about being called...
Age Poems
Poetry can be hard to teach, in my experience. Anytime I mention the words poetry or poems, my students tend to groan. So I work hard all year to find...
The Reluctant Marathoner: Reflecting on Student Engagement
Four years ago, I did something that I never in a million years thought I would do: I ran a marathon. I have been a runner for years and had...
Many Uses for Mentor Texts to Teach Argument Writing
Crafting a strong piece of argument writing is essential in middle school, according to the standards. The best way we have to teach our sixth- and seventh-grade students how to...
Nurturing Independent Reading Lives in Middle School
Independent-choice reading is the lifeline of our literacy classroom. We are firm believers, like the educators we admire and learn from, that when given the right books, time to read,...
Poetry Resources for Remote Learning
I have always loved poetry. I’m not sure if the love began when my grandparents gave me my first poetry book, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, or if it was...
Poetry and Pastiche
Infusing poetry throughout the school year rather than restricting it to just one unit is one of our goals. There are many benefits to having more poetry in classrooms. One...
The Curious Incident of Poem in the Stream of Time
—this daydream of meddling with writing. Michel De Montaigne In the nighttime a poem crawls out of a bog, hides trembling behind a tangle of myths, circles the sunrise painting...
