What Makes a Poem … a Poem?

Whether you are viewing a landscape painting of a farm, examining a still-life portrait of a bowl of fruit, or reading a descriptive poem about cultivating food, you can't deny that agriculture plays a major role in visual and language...

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...

After investigating the Black Lives Matter movement, class members do a close read of Roger Reeves' "Black Laws." They write down words and phrases that rhyme, consider the kinds of rhymes used and their function in the poem. Scholars...

Jane Hirshfield's poem "My Skeleton" asks readers to pause and think about the amazing, often taken-for-granted structure that protects and gives form to human bodies. After observing the human skeleton's image, class members read the...

Arthur Sze's poem, "The Shapes of Leaves," encourages young scholars to notice and speak for others who "do not speak." The lesson begins with pupils writing about a tree that they really like. The class then examines an image of...

Change, growth, and a sense of belonging are the focus of a unit that uses poetry to explore these themes and the distinguishing features of poetry as well. 

Two exercises boost scholars' knowledge of a onomatopoeia with excerpts from famous poems. In exercise one, participants circle onomatopoeia words. Exercise two challenges writers to choose three words to use in an original poem.

Scholars take part in two exercises to boost their knowledge of personification. After reading a detailed description and excerpts from famous poems, writers list action verbs and objects then combine words to create a humorous...

Numerous people from China immigrated to the US during the era of industrialization and expansion. Provide your class with a glimpse into the life of a Chinese immigrant through the poetry they left behind. They then compose a poem of...

A poem is compressed speech, like a can of frozen juice with all the water pressed out. An interactive teaches users how to reconstitute the language, the structure, and the literary devices to appreciate all the subtleties the poet...