Students investigate the effects of word choice in Robert Frost's "Choose Something Like a Star" to construct a more sophisticated understanding of speaker, subject, and tone.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Students research, evaluate, and synthesize information about the Harlem Renaissance from varied resources, create an exhibit, and highlight connections across disciplines (i.e., art, music, and poetry) using a Venn diagram.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
A curriculum unit of three lessons in which students explore Hopi place names, poetry, song, and traditional dance to better understand the ways Hopi people connect with the land and environment through language. The unit is centered on the practice of growing corn. Students make inferences about language, place, and culture and also look closely at their own home environment and landscape to understand the places, language, and songs that give meaning to cultures and communities
Material Type: Lesson
Grade 4: Module 1 of the EL Education K-8 Language Arts Curriculum. In this module, students build their literacy and social-emotional skills through the analysis of literary and informational texts, as they engage in a study of what inspires people to embrace a love of poetry and writing. For more information on getting started with the curriculum, please visit https://curriculum.eleducation.org.
Material Type: Module
Students improve their reading fluency by selecting a poem online to perform in class.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Adapting the song "A-Hunting We Will Go," students put a "whale" in a "pail" and even "take a little "bear" and hug it if we "dare"."
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Learn more about the Japanese form of poetry known as haiku. In this video segment from Poetry Everywhere, the poet Robert Hass reads a short collection of amusing, often ironic haiku by Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa.
Material Type: Lecture
Shadows, shadows, everywhere! In this lesson, students read fiction, informational text, and poetry about shadows to extend their knowledge of the concept before casting their own shadow poetry.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Explore the traditions and conventions of haiku and compare this classic form of Japanese poetry to a related genre of Japanese visual art.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
Poets achieve popular acclaim only when they express clear and widely shared emotions with a forceful, distinctive, and memorable voice. But what is meant by voice in poetry, and what qualities have made the voice of Langston Hughes a favorite for so many people?
Material Type: Lesson Plan
Emily Dickinson's poetry often reveals a child-like fascination with the natural world. She writes perceptively of butterflies, birds, and bats and uses lucid metaphors to describe the sky and the sea.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
Students use their five senses as a prewriting tool to guide their poetry writing as they compose free-form poems using imagery to describe a color.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
In this lesson, students explore the historical context of Walt Whitman's concept of "democratic poetry" by reading his poetry and prose and by examining daguerreotypes taken circa 1850. Next, students will compare the poetic concepts and techniques behind Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" and Langston Hughes' "Let America Be America Again," and have an opportunity to apply similar concepts and techniques in creating a poem from their own experience.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
This lesson prompts students to think about a poem's speaker within the larger context of modernist poetry. First, students will review the role of the speaker in two poems of the Romanticism period before focusing on the differences in Wallace Stevens' modernist"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
Long perceived as a recluse who wrote purely in isolation, Emily Dickinson in reality maintained many dynamic correspondences throughout her lifetime and specifically sought out dialogues on her poetry. These correspondences"”both professional and private"”reveal a poet keenly aware of the interdependent relationship between poet and reader.
Material Type: Lesson
Students research engineering careers and create poetry to understand the vocabulary of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson Plan
Reading Emily Dickinson's letters alongside her poems helps students to better appreciate a remarkable voice in American literature, grasp how Dickinson perceived herself and her poetry, and perhaps most relevant to their own endeavors consider the ways in which a writer constructs a "supposed person."
Material Type: Lesson Plan
Some of the most the most essential works of literature in the world are examples of epic poetry, such as The Odyssey and Paradise Lost. This lesson introduces students to the epic poem form and to its roots in oral tradition.
Material Type: Lesson Plan
See the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial wall in Washington D.C. through the eyes of war veteran and contemporary poet Yusef Komunyakaa. In this video segment from Poetry Everywhere, Komunyakaa reads his poem Facing It.
Material Type: Lecture
Students will be singing the blues in this lesson in which they identify themes from "The Gift of the Magi" and write and present blues poetry based on those themes.
Material Type: Activity/Lab, Unit of Study
