This lesson plan has several options for ways of teaching the poem "The Road Not Taken" to students. The plan offers guiding questions, analytical information, and different ways for students to respond after completing their reading of the poem.
In this lesson,students work to transform narrative-style letters into poetic format and they are forced to think carefully about where to end each line. Students begin by discussing letters they have written and working with an online tool as an introduction to letter poems. As a group, students look at a letter form of “This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams and add line breaks to turn it into a poem. They then compare the poem they created with the original, discussing why the poet made the line break choices he did. Next, students
work in small groups to rewrite another letter as a poem and then compare the various groups’ results with the original poem. Students then use a Venn diagram to compare letters and poems. Finally, they compose their own letter poems.
The following series of activities for the classroom allow students to explore and interact with poetry by writing letters to poets.
This lesson in poetic sound offers students the opportunity to "experiment" with the sounds of sonnets. Students read sonnets from a variety of authors, compleing a series of tasks that make them focus on different audible aspects of the poetry.
In this lesson, students identify similes in poetry and gain experience in using similes as a poetic device in their own work.
This is a collection of poetry by African American author Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar's work frequently features a conversational tone, innovative rhetorical structure, and a colorful use of both dialect and mainstream English. Dunbar was among the first nationally successful African American writers.
Source: Dunbar, P.L. (1913). The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company.
This is a collection of poetry by African American author Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar's work frequently features a conversational tone, innovative rhetorical structure, and a colorful use of both dialect and mainstream English. Dunbar was among the first nationally successful African American writers.
Source: Dunbar, P.L. (1913). The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company.
In this lesson students examine how imagery is used to represent ideas, themes, periods of history, and make cultural connections to poem, "Still I Rise." Students will reflect through written expression how resiliency is in their lives, school, and community.
Poet. Orator. Actress. Activist. Writer. Singer. Phenomenal Woman. These and many more superlatives are used to describe the incomparable Maya Angelou. Gone too soon in 2014 at the age of 86, Dr. Angelou's legacy will live on through the words she used to eloquently, powerfully, and honestly express emotions, capture experiences, and spread hope.
This lesson encourages students to closely examine a singular aspect of a poem by writing a mirror poem: a poem that imitates another in a specific chosen way. Students read a poem, then write a mirror poem copying an element of the first one as a way of analyzing its use of a specific poetic technique.
This lesson traces the long history of how African Americans have used music as a vehicle for communicating beliefs, aspirations, observations, joys, despair, resistance, and more across U.S. history.
In this lesson, students read the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley before comparing the statue from the poem to famous monuments from around the world. Students complete a graphic organizer before writing an analytical essay about the poem.
Students will practice visualizing and understanding that visualization is an important comprehension strategy. Students will share their visualization of the story through original artwork.
Students listen to a read aloud of a children's science book and watch a short video on how plankton migrate in the ocean. Students write a poem describing their feelings about what they heard and saw.
After students have been introduced to metaphors, this lesson plan keeps them in practice by identifying and analyzing the use of metaphors in poetry.
This resource includes a quiz which focuses on Reading Literature standard 4. Students will read excerpts of poetry to responding to multiple choice questions. The activity also includes one open-ended response question.
Currently, poetry is something we teach "if there is time" at the end of the year. I would love to make poetry a more integral part of the 1st grade curriculum. Poetry is currently taught by the students reading a preprinted packet of poetry and the students knowing that they are poems. It's a very archaic way of teaching it, and I would love to change that.
The students are introduced to poetry throughout our curriculum (Scott Foresman Reading Street) through songs and curriculum poems, but are never specifically taught what makes a poem. This blended unit will change that! This unit will fall at the end of the 1st grade school year.
Created By: Katharine Valz
Created in WRESA GLAD training by Andy Erickson of Lake Lure Classical Academy for 4th grade ELA. Students explore various poems to identify elements of poetry.
This is an ELA unit on Poetry. This unit support students' understanding of major differences between poems, drama, and prose. Students also learn about the structural elements of poems and drama when writing or speaking about a text.
Students will delve into Emily Dickinson's, "The Moon," to find different types of figurative language. Developing writers will love sharpening their reading comprehension skills with this poetry analysis activity.