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.

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...

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...

Use "The Tell-Tale Heart" to approach point of view and the impact of a narrator. Pupils find specific textual examples of the narrator's derangement and form a personality before discussing a passage to determine some plot points. Class...

Extend your instruction on similes and metaphors with a lesson on Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers" and "There is no Frigate like a Book." After a discussion on the images of each poem and their meanings, kids write an...

In poetry, every word matters. Poets like Edgar Allan Poe make conscious choices when composing. Pupils take a close look at his poem "Romance," taking older word meanings into consideration during analysis and discussion. After a class...

Investigate the beginnings of the detective fiction genre through a discussion and writing assignment related to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter." Class members converse about the elements of the story and then compose brief...

From Seth Abramson to Fay Zwicky, from William Shakespeare and William Butler Yeats to Monica Youn and Al Young. If you’re looking for poems and/or poets, chances are this free resource, designed for your smart phone or tablet, has what...

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

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...