Curated OER
Poetry Genre Focus Lesson
Students explore poetry by listening to readings, identifying and understanding the elements of poetry, as well as the types of poetry. Students respond to poetry through discussions and writing their own poem.
Pearson
Langston Hughes
An author study provides learners the opportunity to explore in depth the life of, the influences on, and the works of a single literary figure. Introduce middle schoolers to Langston Hughes with a unit that models how to approach an...
Curated OER
Poetry Appreciation – "The Raven"
Introduce your class to "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe with this series of activities, exercises, and worksheets. Class members examine an image, analyze a movie trailer, read a prose version of the poem, look up vocabulary, and pick out...
Dr. Seuss Enterprises
Dr. Seuss in the Classroom
Explore the works of Dr. Seuss, such as Horton Hears a Who, Horton Hatches and Egg, The Sneetches and Other Stories, The Lorax, The Butter Battle Book, and Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories. Each story lesson includes reading...
Curated OER
Stanza Proud
Students examine different decades in American history, finding connections between the historical events and the poetry written during these time periods. They write their own poetry based on current world events.
Curated OER
Everyone Sang - Moods in Poetry
Start by reading the poem "Everyone Sang" by Siegried Sassoon. The archive also houses an audio clip, so consider playing that instead of reading it aloud. After hearing the poem twice, middle and high schoolers will discuss a list of...
Curated OER
Langston Hughes Was a Dreamer Too
Encourage your pupils to imagine their own dreams for the future. After studying three poems by Langston Hughes and listening to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech, young poets craft their own dream stanza.
Curated OER
Express Yourself Lesson Seed 11: Setting
Encourage your learners to examine the setting in Theodore Taylor's The Cay. Pupils work in small groups to put together a description of the setting before reading two more chapters of the book. They use their double-entry journals to...
Curated OER
Express Yourself Lesson Seed 13: Character Development 2
Building upon prior lessons in the series, this reading and writing exercise requires pupils to look back at their own writing, track character development in the novel The Cay, and analyze how Phillip has changed. The reading focus is...
Curated OER
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Explore Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" in this literature analysis lesson plan. Middle schoolers read and summarize the plot of the story. They then adapt passages for a contemporary audience and analyze the...
Curated OER
Express Yourself Lesson Seed 12: Story Event
Focus on plot and the impact-specific events in The Cay. Class members use their double-entry journals, created in a previous lesson in this series, to record their thinking about the guiding question as they read chapters 15 through 17....
Curated OER
Pictures in Words: Poems of Tennyson and Noyes
Students examine how Tennyson and Noyes use words to paint vivid pictures. They read and analyze two poems, complete an online scavenger hunt, complete a worksheet, and write examples of alliteration, personification, metaphor, simile,...
Curated OER
Dirty Dan Isn't Dull!
Students read smoothly and expressively while noticing punctuation and using voice inflection to emphasize important words and phrases in the text. They listen to and reread a poem in small groups. Students discuss how the poem sounds...
Read Works
Spring
Celebrate the season of spring with a poem. After reading a four-stanza poem about the season, sixth grade readers respond to 10 reading comprehension questions that have them thinking about the purpose, imagery, and other types of...
Curated OER
"World Enough, And Time"-Andrew Marvell's Coy Mistress
Students read and analyze the poem, "To His Coy Mistress," by Andrew Marvell. They identify the theme of each stanza, complete a worksheet, take an online quiz, and write about a single metaphor or image from the poem.
EngageNY
Grade 11 ELA Module 2: Unit 2, Lesson 10
Audre Lorde's poem "From the House of Yemanjá" describes the speaker carrying two women on her back—she must be strong! Pupils read the second stanza using instructional activity 10 of 14 from the Grade 11 ELA Module 2: Unit 2 series....
EngageNY
Grade 11 ELA Module 2: Unit 2, Lesson 9
How do authors employ specific word choices to describe complex relationships? Scholars read and analyze the first stanza from Audre Lorde's contemporary poem "From the House of Yemanjá." Pupils determine the meanings of figurative and...
EngageNY
Comparing Text Structures: To Kill a Mockingbird and “Those Winter Sundays” (Chapter 6 and 7)
Scholars carry out a close read of the poem "Those Winter Sundays" to determine its point. They look at the words used and the structure of the stanzas and then compare the poem's narrative structure to chapter 6 of To Kill a...
EngageNY
Jigsaw, Part 1: Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!
Complete a puzzle one piece at a time. Scholars gather in triads to complete jigsaw activities over a monologue from Good Masters! Sweet Ladies. They read as a group and independently and use sticky notes to identify the gist of...
Curated OER
Quirky Quatrain Poetry Lesson
Middle schoolers discover what a quatrain is, and are taught the three poetic devices: alliteration, hyperbole, and onomatopoeia. Everyone chooses a favorite hobby or activity, then attempts to write a poem about it. They must write two...
Curated OER
Irony in Poetry and Prose (Fiction and Non-fiction Texts)
Middle and high schoolers examine the impact of irony in poetry and prose. In this figurative language lesson, they read instructor-selected literature and identify uses of irony. Then they discuss how irony enhances literature.
Curated OER
How We Feel
Young scholars examine how their feelings make them unique. They read and discuss a poem, develop a list of feelings, and create a drawing of them feeling happy and healthy.
Curated OER
Using Creative Dramatics With the Teaching of Poetry
Launch your poetry unit in a very dramatic way. Divide your class into groups, and give each group a different poem. After discussing the poem, each group member selects a stanza to study. The group then develops a skit that represents...
Curated OER
Annotating Poetry
Use text marking and highlighting to explore the structure of a poem. After listening to Allan Ahlberg read "Please Mrs. Butler," learners locate stanzas and patterns on their copy of the poem using the text marking technique. Class...