We Sing America

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 class to free verse poetry. But before that, ask your class to watch people at work and note down observations. These observations will be the basis for their own poem along a similar vein as the poems they will read and discuss in small groups and as a class.