A (Remote) Exploration of Poetry: Week 1

Hello, dear friends and brave teachers,

I’m going to dispense with the bells and whistles because none of us have time for that. Since my students are at home for the rest of the year, I’ve made some on-the-fly adjustments to our curriculum (like: No Macbeth By Yourself at Home!) and, so, come up with an April-lengthed poetry exploration in honor of National Poetry Month.

I’d like to share it with you.

Here’s the barest bare bones:

• Each week, we zoom in on one element of poetry.
• Each week, I provide one poetry mini-lesson that models unpacking some elements of a poem in a video for students and asks them to draft a poem.
• Each week, students choose to complete ONE (of two) annotation activities and ONE (of two) discussion activities on either Padlet or Flipgrid.

The big goal is that students will be exposed to a variety of poetry, dive deep into a few key elements of poetry, and write some of their own. At the end of the month, we will do a one-week workshop where they take a few of those poetry drafts and revise them into something they are ready to turn in and publish.

(P.S. If you don’t already,  head to Brett Vogelsinger’s brilliant GO POEMS! blog each day for a new 10-minute poetry activity during National Poetry Month.)

Week One: STRUCTURE

(I had originally shared the documents in this post as live Google Docs to make it easier for you to copy and edit them to meet your needs. However, as individuals have been going in and making changes to the original docs, I have had to lock them down as PDFs.)

This week we are taking a look at structure through three poems that all deal with the natural world: “Meteor Shower” by Clint Smith, “How Dark the Beginning” by Maggie Smith, and “Death of a Naturalist” by Seamus Heaney.

• Mini-Lesson + Drafting Invitation (Copy of Meteor Shower)
• “How Dark the Beginning” Annotation Activity (Copy of _How Dark the Beginning_ Annotation)
• “Death of a Naturalist” Annotation Activity (Copy of _Death of a Naturalist_ by Seamus Heaney)

Since you will need to set up your own Padlet wall or Flipgrid for discussion, I’m not including those instructions here.

DISCUSSION 1: Consider the three poems together — how are they doing similar things? How are they doing different things? How does each poem see the natural world?

DISCUSSION 2: Choose an image from each poem that illustrates the tone and talk about what you notice and what you think it means for the poem.

I hope this helps take something off your plate and engage your students in some meaningful reading and writing while they are away from you.

You’re doing great! Stay well.

Love,

Rebekah