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
“Old Age Sticks”: Poetry Analysis in Eighth Grade
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 first video in a two-part series....
Analyzing Poetry in Third Grade
Leslie Lloyd's third graders analyze literal and figurative language (which they describe as “nonliteral”) in Donald Graves's poem "Bully."
Teaching Punctuation with Poetry
During our Summer Writing Academy, 40 students who enjoy writing and four teachers who love teaching writing came together for five days of poetry. During those days no one talked...
Weaving in Poetry
“They don’t really seem to understand how to read poetry yet,” my administrator says in September. “Well, not yet. It’s only September, and we are just starting to closely read...
The Case for the Sonnet
Upon hearing mention of a sonnet, I imagine many people’s train of thought goes something like this: sonnet = Shakespeare = old = boring. Sonnets, by their very nature, are...
Message from Old Crow
In a slipstream of winter light I wait along time’s trail—freed from the urgencies of earlier days, still feasting on what remains. Mountain spirits roar through the pines, stir...
Tests of Time
The night before the exam, we scrawl The Late Unpleasantness across the blackboard from Sumter to Appomattox, and tack up dates like tattered flags. I dish up Ramen noodles...
Shaking Off the Village
Shaking Off the Village (after Wanderlust) Today, I walk—cloud-gaze, woolgather, meander—because it is slow. I take leave of my senses, do nothing in particular, with nobody, all alone....
Closing Out the Year with “Where I’m From”
For nine of the ten years I’ve been teaching, I’ve been in a classroom with eighth graders. Part of what I love so much about this age group is that...
A Spring Villanelle
Deep in the samadhi of the old pond soft heavenly weather arrives, light seeps into rock, enchanted by the eternal tide. Peepers rise in a chime of bells clear,...
One Tool, Many Uses: Poetry Notebooks
Lori uses poetry notebooks in her first-grade classroom. I’ve been in her classroom many times when her students were using their poetry notebooks. The word notebook is probably a misnomer...
Blackout Poems and Paint-Chip Haiku: Two Fun Ways into Poetry with Adolescents
Writing can be really hard, especially for kids. I see my students struggle the most when I introduce poetry. It almost seems as if when they are given fewer words...
Summer’s a Gypsy
She takes the hand of Juno and walks through a thin wash of rain into light. Her toes loosen the quickening earth. She stops to weave the lush strands...
The Habit of Budding
Treeflower. Embryonic shoots protect a covering of modified leaves. Scales tightly enclose their nakedness, crinkled, overlapped. Axillary, alternate, opposite, whorled— they bulge in unexpected places. Adventitious. An outgrowth...
Poemfields
I have felt the hard knuckle of winter, have gorged myself with the intoxication of nothing to be done. Among the circling rituals of work and the pileup of...
The Cure for Senioritis? Poetry!
Teaching seniors at the end of the year is always a challenge. The other day, I actually heard one student say to another, “Why would I bother learning anything now?”...
Just-Right Poetry and Individualizing Instruction
One of the challenges of teaching is finding the right books and materials to address specific instructional goals. Once teachers have found the perfect book to help their students understand...
Poetry and Fluency Minilesson in Second Grade
Sean Moore uses poetry for a short minilesson on fluency, and then follows with a partner share and vocabulary discussion. The poem Sean reads with the children is The Busy...
Poetry Minute: Forms and How to Teach Them
In the same way that artists learn the rules of form and color before they experiment with ways to break the rules, students often feel more comfortable writing poetry when...
Sketching Trees in Winter
Squatting down behind a stone fence, the trees at the top of the hill, as familiar as my face, look oddly new, uneasy, like the whitening air between us. Quiet...
Poetry Friday in the Computer Lab
“Poetry Friday in the Computer Lab?” questioned one of my students on a Friday morning in mid-May as he scanned the daily agenda on the chalkboard. “How can we do...
