Iambic Pentameter

Are your middle schoolers writing a sonnet? Here's a worksheet to help them craft their first sonnet! Make edits as you see necessary. 

Ta DUM, ta DUM, ta DUM, ta DUM, ta DUM. The force will be strong in the hearts of your young Jedi as they use their lightsabers to strike the accentted syllables in lines from Ian Doescher's William Shakespeare's Star Wars: Verily, A New...

How does an author's choice of artistic medium influence an audience? What about how an author chooses to transform original source material? These are the questions class members grapple with as they compare scenes from episode IV...

Shakespeare's use of language is the focus of this short PowerPoint. Each of the three slides describes one way he chose to write his plays: in iambic pentameter, and in couplets. The final slide describes a sonnet, which is a lyric poem...

Here's a fun way to introduce your young poets to literary terms associated with poetry. Colorful and filled with examples that illustrate the terms and their definitions, the entire presentation could be used at the beginning of a unit,...

Spice up your traditional approach to teaching poetic structure with a wonderful animated video, which not only covers such terms as foot, meter, verse, but also stresses Shakespeare's unique use of iambic pentameter to convey emotion...

What is blank verse? Iambic pentameter? Meter? Use the attached document to review these ideas with your middle schoolers. This plan has learners get up and stomp to iambic pentameter, which is a fun change from just clapping the meter! 

Read in iambic pentameter! Read Julius Caesar and Macbeth to study the famous meter. While the lesson points out the specific passages to use, you'll have to find them and copy them yourself. 

Students parody Polonius's speech to his son by writing a script of unsolicited advice which they then deliver to a fellow classmate. They discover that Polonius isn't necessarily original or profound simply because he speaks in iambic...

Introduce writers to Shakespeare and the sonnet. They write a Shakespearean sonnet after reading some examples. They understand Shakespearean meter and form after reading Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day." They then...