We will recognize how poetry can be incorporated into

any classroom to enhance student engagement and learning using a poetry

analysis activity and writing exercises.

• Choose five cards from the stack at your table.

• Use the five words to create a line of poetry or short poem. You can work alone or in groups.

Teaching poetry is a dying art and it’s a sad thing. I personally have made it my mission at my school to get it back into our curriculum wherever possible. I believe it’s more suited to our contemporary lifestyle than any other genre and it’s a vital, but often dismissed, part of our culture.

“Teaching kids to write is the most powerful way I feel I can affect their lives, and I do it without preaching a single word. I need only help them generate and craft poems, help them bring together their experience and imagination and language on the page, and they feel indebted to me for life. I've seen writing help kids in profound ways: good decisions on the page translate to good decisions in their lives.” - DOUG GOETSCH

“I teach for the students who look to me and say, ‘You write?’ I teach for the need in their eyes, the want to know there is some reason and satisfaction in doing what tugs at their very souls for them to do. I teach also for the students who take my class and say, ‘I can't write.’ I teach so I can show them that they are wrong. I teach in order to hear a student write a new line and yell to the rest of the class, "I've never heard that before in the history of the entire world!" I teach poetry so that I can keep hearing new things in the world, and I teach poetry so that I can make sure there are new things being made in this world.”- RICHARD K. WEEMS

Poetry celebrates diversity

Poetry appeals to all ability levels Don’t believe me? I got proof.

Poetry is good for struggling readers, English language learners and at-risk students.

Poetry is a good way to introduce or enrich history lessons. There are poems written about practically every major event in history.

Writing poetry is a useful tool in history– persona poems

poems that come from a particular area are also good for Geography/ World Studies… Examples include the ghazal, pantoum, haiku, sestina, villanelle, renga.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178599

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2006/10/20/science-poem-of-the-week-1/

Scientists seem to like writing limericks and riddles. The internet is full of math and science limericks… Like this guy who has a whole science joke website

http://jcdverha.home.xs4all.nl/scijokes/poet.html

Flat- Sentences from the Prefaces of

Fourteen Science Books

Poetry is now going to be part of the STAAR tests and traditionally at DVHS English teachers shy away from poetry. It’s not on TAKS after all.

Guess what… the STAAR will force students to be able to read and analyze poems. Gasp!

However, it can also be used as a tool to write personal narrative, etc…

A Note Slipped Under the Door: Teaching from the Poems We Love by Nick Flynn & Shirley McPhillips

Fooling with Words by Bill Moyers

American Poetry Now: Pitt Poetry Series Anthology by Ed Ochester

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/

http://www.poets.org/