Engage your class in the elements of poetry with a series of lessons and activities. The plans cover simile, metaphor, personification, onomatopoeia, alliteration, and imagery. Learners come up their their own metaphors, identify poetic...

What makes a poem a poem? Give your class a basic understanding of some of the different aspects of poetry by showing them a slide show of poetic devices and elements. The presentation is quite long, so you might split it up into a few...

Explication may sound like a fancy word, but it's just a fancy way to say analysis. Using a handout on poetry explications, part of a larger series on specific writing assignments, writers learn how to break down and analyze a poem. The...

FANBOYS will enjoy breaking grammar rules, but they will have to use coordinating conjunctions, gerunds, compound sentences, compound-complex sentences, and even predicates as they craft poems like Shel Silverstein.

Looking for a resource that models how to read and analyze a poem? Check out this packet that uses sections of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" to demonstrate how to paraphrase, note literary elements, and identify the poet's inferences.

Pass the tea! Using the resource, scholars participate in a Tea Party protocol to analyze text and images about inventions that helped meet societal demands. After sharing their observations with each other, they discuss visual elements...

Looking for a resource to introduce homeschoolers and other out-of-class learners to the elements of poetry? Check out this packet that defines and illustrates important poetry terms.

Have everything you need to know about the elements of poetry with a nine-page handout. Split into four categories—word sounds, meanings, arrangement, and imagery—budding poets may reference terms, read definitions, descriptions, and...

Learners follow five steps to compose an alliteration poem. They choose one consonant and brainstorm as many nouns, verbs, and adjectives they can think of to create rhyming sentences that come together in a poetic fashion. 

Tone and Mood are not synonymous! Introduce young readers to these literary devices with a series of exercises that not only point out the significant differences between the terms but also shows them how to identify both the tone and...

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...

Sometimes saying I'm sorry just doesn't cut it. Scholars examine a series of apology poems, songs, and stories and consider each speaker's regrets. Using what they have learned, they analyze James Hurst's short story, "The Scarlet Ibis,"...

How does poetry differ from other forms of writing? Class members view two writing samples, decide which one is a poem, and then identify the criteria they used to distinguish between the two samples.  

Whether you are planning on using Of Mice and Men for whole-class reading or as a selection for literature circles; whether you are new to John Steinbeck's novel, or it has long been a part of your curriculum, you...

Terror, mystery, excitement. American writers of the 19th century, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, used these elements to create morally ambiguous tales that challenged the prevailing belief in...

Clichés, paradoxes, and equivocations are detailed in a short, animated video that defines and illustrates these writing traps. The resource also includes a quiz and the transcript for the video. Users can register to access free course...

Young poets demonstrate their understanding of a character from Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street by crafting a biopoem that captures the essence of this person.

Wrap up your literary analysis unit with a discussion activity as tenth graders prepare for an end-of-unit assessment. After they have read and annotated Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepard to His Love," Sir Walter Raleigh's...

A speaker, a message, an audience. After analyzing these elements in Queen Elizabeth's speech to the troops at Tilbury, groups analyze how other speakers use an awareness of events, and their audience to craft their arguments....

Should primary graders have their own computers? Should animals be kept in captivity? Young writers learn how to develop and support a claim in this short unit on persuasive writing.

The phonemic awareness activities in this packet are designed to help kids develop skills in rhyming, syllabication, blending onsets and rimes, and beginning and ending sounds. Well worth a place in your curriculum library.