Curated OER
Dali & Desnos: Surrealism in Poetry and Art
High schoolers research the surrealism movement and its primary artists. Language is also analyzed, and students will create their own original poem utilizing surrealistic techniques.
Curated OER
Learning Through the Duke
Students examine the contributions of Duke Ellington to the field of jazz. They create an original poem using popular vocabulary from the 1920s, listen to the book, "Duke Ellington," and paint a picture while listening to music by Duke...
Poetry Out Loud
Poems Put to Use
Why do we have to study poetry? Here is a lesson plan that demonstrates some of poetry's more practical and real-world applications for reluctant learners. Start by leading a brainstorming session about where poems or pieces of poems...
Curated OER
Traveling Through Literature
Integrate geography with literature in this interdisciplinary lesson. Begin by reading a poem such as The Time We Climbed Snake Mountain by Leslie Marmon Silko. On a large map, place push pins in the cities or states mentioned. An...
Curated OER
Through the Looking Glass
An engaging and ambitious series of four lessons invites high schoolers to view art work, have group and class discussions, construct time lines, compile photos, and conduct research. Learners share their experiences, create...
Curated OER
Pass It On: African American Poetry to Inspire Writing
Learners read through poems in a book called Pass it On. There are 19 poems from famous African American poets contained in the book. The poems are specialized for children and after the children have learned about the author and about...
Curated OER
Tying Your Shoes- Poem
Students recite a poem to organize the steps to tie their shoes. In this shoe tying lesson, students learn a poem that gives the directions on how to tie shoes.
Curated OER
Symphonic Poetry (SMART Board Lesson)
Let music and poetry collide in this well-orchestrated language arts lesson plan. After studying program music and C. Debussy's Prelude to an Afternoon Faun, view the attached SMART board lesson plan to read through "Fog" by Carl...
Curated OER
Poe's Poetry and Prosody
Motivate your class with this lesson! Learners use passages from Edgar Allan Poe's poetry to practice reading fluency. They read "The Raven" as a rap song to better understand the rhyming patterns and pauses.
Curated OER
Peace and Perspective through Poetry: The Dream of Peace in the Middle East
Middle schoolers use poetry to understand conflict in the Middle East. In this poetry lesson, students read persona poems and use the poetry and a novel as mentor text to guide their own poem about peace in the Middle East.
National Endowment for the Humanities
The Beauty of Anglo-Saxon Poetry: A Prelude to Beowulf
Riddle me this! What do kennings, caesura, and alliteration have to do with the Nowell Codex? Introduce class members to Anglo-Saxon poetry and prepare readers for a study of Beowulf with a series of activities that includes asking...
Harper Collins
Every Thing On It Lessons and Activities
Honor the great poet, Shel Silverstein with eighteen activities and lessons showcasing his collection of poems from the book, Every Thing On It. Activities challenge scholars to rhyme words, make inferences, recite a poem, and more!
Curated OER
Our Poetic Planet - Writing Poems about the Earth
As a way to combine language arts and science, try this lesson plan on writing cloud poetry. Begin by showing a PowerPoint presentation and images of cloud types. Take meteorology masters outdoors to explore the sky using the provided...
Curated OER
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Christmas Bells
Students read and analyze the anti-slavery poem, "Christmas Bells" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They discuss the content and form of the poem, write an essay, write an original poem, examine how this anti-slavery poem was converted...
Core Task Project
Whatif by Shel Silverstein
What a skillful way to incorporate Shel Silverstein, a wonderful author, into the classroom. Composed of three tasks, children are led through a series of text-dependent questions that force them to unveil the meaning of Silverstein's...
National Park Service
A Natural Resource Called Peace
Get your pupils outside and teach them about peace at the same time! Scholars create a list describing peace, hike outside, add to that list, and later create poems. The exercises support differentiation for your individual classes as...
Curated OER
Brave New World: Biopoem
“Words can be like x-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything.” Readers of Brave New World will be pierced by an activity that asks them to use details from the text to craft a biopoem for one of the characters in Aldous...
Curated OER
Writing and Autobiography
Are you working on an autobiographical or narrative writing unit? Bring this lesson to your class, as it takes young writers through the process of drafting and sequencing an autobiography. After observing and demonstrating steps of the...
Curated OER
Recasting Language through Found Poetry
Discover the concept of found poetry in this engaging instructional activity. Secondary students will explore the poem "Natural Selection" and compare it to the writings of Charles Darwin in Origin of the Species. Students chose a text...
Captain Planet Foundation
Sense of Place
Explore the five senses with a kindergarten instructional activity on gardening. After taking a walk through the class garden, kids note what they see, hear, feel, taste, and smell, and then decide what is living in the garden versus...
KERA
Matisse and Picasso
Discover Modernism through the eyes of artists. Over the course of six well-thought-out lessons, learners examine works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse while completing a range of collaborative and hands-on activities. A great resource!
Curated OER
Death in Poetry: A.E. Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young" and Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"
Students analyze poems about death. In this poetry analysis instructional activity, students read poems from both Dylan Thomas and A.E. Housman and analyze them in groups for common poetic devices. Students present their analysis and...
Curated OER
Symphonic Poetry
Students interpret the themes in Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, create a 6-line poem based on the themes in the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, and define musical terms related to the study of programmatic music in...
Poetry Class
Tackling Climate Change
Get your kids thinking about climate change with a series of activities that include creating a ditty box poem for the planet, a poem that identifies concepts or objects they would want to preserve.