The Impact of a Poem's Line Breaks: Enjambment and Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool"

Find the poem embedded with great prose. Young poets transform prose sentences and paragraphs into poems using line breaks and forms. Consider having class members share their creations.

Examine poetic structure and literary devices in an activity focused on Maya Angelou's "Woman Work." The first two pages provide the full text of the poem, which middle schoolers can annotate and highlight. They go on to complete a...

The cat might have got your tongue, but you can’t avoid the elephant in the room while you wait for the other shoe to drop. After all, the early bird gets the worm and the chickens are circling. After researching Poet Laureate Kay Ryan...

Need some ideas for poetry lessons? Check out this packet loaded with suggestions for elementary, middle, and high school writers.

Focus on the musicality of poetry by reading out loud or playing a recording of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells" and "The City and the Sea." Discuss the tone, rhythm, and sounds of the poems before launching into a written analysis of the...

Nascent poets carefully examine a color photograph and then respond to a series of questions. Using these responses, they craft a poem prompted by the image. A link to powerful photos is included so the exercise can be repeated.

Students analyze the Gwendolyn Brooks use of enjambment in her poem "We Real Cool." In this poetry analysis lesson, students define common poetic devices and the examples of enjambment in the poem. Students discuss the poem and write an...

Students examine the use of tone in poetry. In this literature lesson, students read "We Real Cool," by Gwendolyn Brooks and use the provided graphic organizer to chart the poem's tone and mood.

Compare how word and phrase choice effects how abstract concepts such as theme are interpreted. Young analysts read then watch the film version of Death of a Salesman, consider word choice and theme, then create a found poem using words,...

Pair the famous poems "I Hear America Singing," by Walt Whitman, and "I, Too, Sing America," by Langston Hughes, with a more recent poem by Elizabeth Alexander called "Praise Song for the Day" to demonstrate a theme and introduce your...