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
Poetry Path
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. The sound of the stapler out in the hallway meant that more poems were being shared on the bulletin board outside my classroom. I peeked around the...
Things That Can Fly Away—A Tribute to Mary Oliver
Things that can fly away in memory of Mary Oliver Take the word butterfly— drinks from every urn in a continuing thirst for grace. Take the word blackbird— flies in...
Poetry Connections
Every day at the start of class my coteacher would remind him to take down his hood. He ducked his head inside the hood-cave even farther before reluctantly pulling it...
Past Midnight
—remembering Eva she rides a river of words like a floater in a rip tide. Rogue waves strain for space outside the breaking zone. ...
The Power of Similes
Write a good simile for me. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Not so easy, right? You can come up with a bad simile in a minute or two or rattle off...
The Third (or More) Time Is the Charm
Remember the Where’s Waldo? books you used to look at as a kid? Do you think you’d be able to find Waldo—let alone take in all the other details—if you...
Pick a Poem
“Hey, look at the next page! It’s about a tiger!” Robert, whom many referred to as all boy or by some initialism that gets tossed around to explain student listlessness,...
A Poem About Lost Friendship: Conferring with Estelle
Estelle shares a poem she has written about lost friendship with her teacher, Katherine Sokolowski. She captures the fickle nature of fifth-grade relationships among girls. Katherine connects the cadence of...
Message from the Moon
Message from the Moon In my solitary work I am dark, a wounded myth of stories, ghosts and dreams. You brush the hard places luminous like a campfire—...
Spoken Word Poetry
For once, the security light that never goes off in the corner of my classroom was useful. Beneath this makeshift spotlight stood a stool from my kitchen counter and my...
Object Poetry Lesson in Second Grade
Linda Karamatic explores poetry with her second graders. She displays poems students have written and teaches them about fresh language using a poem about a pencil sharpener. ...
Dabbling: Reviving a Focus on Play
It was April, and we were beginning our final unit of study in writing workshop—narrative nonfiction. Coincidentally, my own National Poetry Month poem-a-day project was narrative nonfiction—poems inspired by the...
News from the Interior
Every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer. Gaston Bachelard Now that the mockingbird claps winter from its wings, plunges, light-blind into the baptismal font of the...
“Old Age Sticks”: Choral Reading and Reflection
Christy Rush-Levine leads her eighth graders in a choral reading and analysis of the E. E. Cummings poem "Old Age Sticks." This is the second video in a two-part series....
Easing into Writing Poetry
The poet's job is to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important, and yet so difficult to name, to tell the truth in...
Beyond the Acrostic Poem
My announcing that we're going to study poetry to a class of fourth-grade students is usually met with groans and looks of fear. In the beginning of the year, I...
Poetry Read-Alouds During Transitions
There they sat. Spines showing and alphabetized by author: never moved, read, or enjoyed. I would gather some for Poetry Friday, only to realphabetize and let them sit until the...
Life in a Single Breath
the sky shivers in the pond, clouds pass through watery leaves— autumn darkens great silent owl sweeps over the field, moonlight splinters late september woodsmoke and leafpiles— the last of...
Random Poetry
“I can’t write poetry.” “I don’t get poetry.” “Poetry isn’t for me.” I hear students making these kinds of blanket statements about poetry all the time. Why are students (and...
Not Just in April: Poetry All Year Long
One of the most important life lessons that writing and reading poetry can teach our students is to help them reach into their well of feelings—their emotional lives—like no other...
Poetry Through Song
As a student, I had no use for poetry. Beyond Shel Silverstein, which required no effort to understand, poetry felt elusive and fuzzy to me. When a teacher would announce...
