National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman delineates her reasons for claiming that all poetry is political. The video captures the poet's passion and commitment to speaking up and speaking out. It is a must-have resource.

Amanda Gorman, the United States's first National Youth Poet Laureate, is featured in a resource from the Academy of American Poets. Class members first read Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech and note what King wanted...

An animated interpretation of Clint Smith's poem "Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class" explores the stereotypes Black Americans encounter.

After a close reading Marge Piercy's poem "Barbie Doll," class members craft an AP®-style explanatory essay in which they analyze the diction and other figurative literary devices the poet employs to deliver her commentary on modern...

Brendan Constantine's anti-gun poem, "The Opposites Game," comes to life in a short video that animates the poem as Constantine recites it.

To prepare for crafting their own memoir, class members examine poetry by Margaret Atwood, Billy Collins, Robert Hayden, and Claude McKay, stories by Richard Rodriquez and Willa Cather, and Barry Levinson's film Avalon. They examine how...

The poems of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are the focus of a unit that asks readers to consider how an artist's life and changes in society influences his or her work. After careful study of Whitman's and Dickinson's perspectives on...

How do Poe's choices of imagery, rhythm and rhyme scheme, and structure help build the desired single effect of "The Raven"? After listening to a dramatic reading of the poem, class members consider whether Poe's choices do create a...

After watching West of the West's documentary The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, class members imagine how Juana Maria/Karana may have felt about living alone on the island for 18 years and craft a blackout poem or a narrative in her...

Focus on poetry this summer to enhance those comprehension, fluency, and language skills with a set of resources intended to explore different types of poetry, specifically lyric poetry. The daily activities contain differentiation ideas...

Alice Walker's poem "Women" provides ninth graders the opportunity to demonstrate their ability to identify how a writer's choice of syntax and diction contribute to the development of the theme of the work.

Looking for a fresh approach to an end-of-unit project for The Odyssey? Check out a resource that has class members write their own hero's journey short story and then craft an illustration that depicts their tale. Apollonio di...

Phillis Whedatley's “On Being Brought from Africa to America” and Paul Laurence Dunbar's “Ode to Ethiopia” offer an opportunity for readers to respond to paired text questions. Using evidence from the poems to respond to questions,...

"A Bird Came Down the Walk" by Emily Dickinson is the focus text of a narrative poetry-based reading comprehension worksheet. After reading her poem, young readers respond to seven multiple choice and three short answer questions. The...

After reading a short narrative poem, fifth graders answer five multiple choice questions based on what they read. Each question addresses a different skill, including vocabulary in context, identifying main idea, drawing conclusions,...

A good gift is hard to find. A “worn truth,” perhaps, as Billy Collins says in his poem, “The Lanyard,” but true nonetheless. After a study of Collins’ tribute to a mother’s love, young poets select an object that sends them “into the...

How well do your learners really know the characters in Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising? A biopoem activity prompts readers to investigate the characters and their traits. Line by line, writers add the characters' relatives,...

Young poets are asked to craft a poem in the voice of a first person narrator, a dramatic monologue of sorts, that reveals not only a dramatic situation but something of the narrator's character as well.

Instruct your readers to scrounge through the pages of Maniac Magee in search for descriptive passages or words they may use to write poetry. As they look for meaningful, sensory descriptors in Jerry Spinelli's novel, readers connect to...

"Everything we have seen and touched and heard and experienced has, in some way, made us who we are." Your young learners will use this resource to create lists of influences (people, animal, nature, places, etc.) in their lives and to...