Spongebob Squarepants helps teach middle schoolers about personification! After discussing the human characteristics demonstrated by the cartoon character, scholars identify the personification in poems by Emily Dickinson and Langston...

Poetic language is abundant in Natalie Babbitt's beautiful novel, Tuck Everlasting. Learners note the examples of similes, metaphors, and personification they find as they read, and illustrate how the language creates a sensory...

Poetry or prose? That is the question facing middle schoolers as they begin a month-long poetry unit by examining the characteristics that differentiate poetry and prose writing. Pupils learn about poetic devices and different types of...

Discover lyric poetry through a reading of Sympathy by Paul Laurence Dunbar and analyze its meaning with three short-answer questions covering symbolism, personification, alliteration, metaphors, and similes. 

Walt Whitman's "Captain, My Captain" and Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" provide seventh graders with examples of odes. After reading and discussing these and other examples, young poets craft an ode and respond to the ode of a...

A study of Rudyard Kipling's poem, "If," launches a lesson about theme. Class members read Kipling's poem and poems by other seventh graders to identify the themes.

The second lesson of a pair about Paul Laurence Dunbar, this plan focuses in particular on his poem, "We Wear the Masks." After a short historical introduction, class members conduct a series or readings, marking up the text and...

Introduce middle schoolers to poetic devices with a activity that asks them to find examples of alliteration, anaphora, onomatopoeia, metaphors, similes, and personification in various poems. Young scholars craft examples of these poetic...

Three of Emily Dickinson's poems, "I like to see it," "Because I could not stop for Death," and "We grow accustomed to the Dark," provide instructors with an opportunity to model for class members how to use close reading strategies to...

Young poets learn the value of using a thesaurus when crafting and revising poems. They examine poems rich in figurative language and then a revised version with the figurative language removed. To demonstrate what they have learned,...