Creative Ideas. Innovative Resources. Successful Teachers.
A Painless Poetry Introduction Say the word “poetry” and your students cringe (and admit it – some of you do too.) Teaching a successful poetry unit begins with a solid introduction, but here’s the good news: there are many ways to start, and none of them are any better than the others. What you’ll find below are several of the most successful ways to ease
Poetry. Love. February. Valentine’s Day. Teenagers. An interesting mix, wouldn’t you say? If you teach high school students in February, all of these collide right around the middle of the month. Most students I teach know all about the holiday, but some are (recently) single, indifferent, hurting, or even jaded, so mushy love poems are not for them. The five poems that I’ve collected here
Start off a new year with poetry; there’s nothing better! Poetry is rigorous, interesting, and easily adaptable to the time you have to teach it. For its flexibility and for the multitude of lessons it allows us to teach, poetry is, hands down, my favorite type of literature. What you’ll find below are five poems that are ideal for jumpstarting the new year,
Have you ever had to convince a room full of 15-year-olds that poetry is cool? Or that, with your help, they’ll be able to understand it? Or maybe (if the planets align just so) that they’ll like it? If so, then you know all too well the poetry sales pitch every ELA teacher has had to make to those skeptical, unforgiving disbelievers. Fortunately, videos of
At the secondary level, Valentine’s Day is often overlooked. There’s no exchanging of Valentines and there’s no heart-shaped red and pink classroom decor. With emotions and hormones running high through high school hallways, love can be a touchy subject. What I like to do is share a poem that is the opposite of what my students might expect–“This Year’s Valentine” by Philip Appleman. It’s a
If you’d like to really get to know your students, just ask them about their history. Where are their roots? Where are their people? Where is their heart? Because while students are, obviously, where they are now, they are also, and probably more importantly, the journey that got them there. And the journey, the history, is often what they hold nearest to their soul. Students,
