The 7th grade poetry unit gives an in depth approach to poetry involving the four strands within the core. I've included worksheets, rubrics, and answers keys where applicable. I have also used literature examples from the core.
Students will be creating a variety of poetry as well as analyzing poetry. They will work with Language standards and take a performance assessment at the end of the unit.
In this class we will practice skills in reading, analyzing, and writing about fiction, poetry and drama from a select sampling of 20th Century American Literature. Through class discussion, close reading, and extensive writing practice, this course seeks to develop critical and analytical skills, preparing students for more advanced academic work.
In Philip Levine's post-war poem, Belle Isle, 1949, two strangers meet, swim, and part, exploring themes of connection, boundaries, and where we come from. This video segment comes from Poetry Everywhere.
Students investigate the effects of word choice in Robert Frost's "Choose Something Like a Star" to construct a more sophisticated understanding of speaker, subject, and tone.
Students select what they believe to be the most important word in a text that they have read and justify their choice using examples from the text.
In this interdisciplinary seminar, we explore a variety of visual and written tools for self exploration and self expression. Through discussion, written assignments, and directed exercises, students practice utilizing a variety of media to explore and express who they are.
Phenology is the study of seasonal and cyclical changes in nature. In this Unit, students will follow in the footsteps of Aldo Leopold and his children by closely observing the natural world around them, connecting those observations to the seasonal changes in their landscape, and developing an appreciation for the dedication of scientists like Leopold. They will Connect, Explore, and Engage with nature through poetry writing, technology-assisted exploration, and phenological observations.
Subject focuses on fiction, drama, and poetry and possibly films inspired by these topics mostly of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. This semester, Contemporary Literature (21L.488) deals with Irish literature, a subject broad and deep. To achieve a manageable volume of study, the course focuses primarily on poetry and prose, at drama's expense, and on living writers, at the expense of their predecessors. Each class session follows a discussion format, often with students assigned to lead-off or summarize the day's topic.
Students write poems using rhyme and meter as they come to understand the mechanical concept of rhythm, based on the principle of oscillation, in a broader biological and cultural context, as seen in dance and sports, poetry and other literary forms, and communication in general. Note: The literacy activities for the Mechanics unit are based on physical themes that have broad application to our experience in the world â concepts of rhythm, balance, spin, gravity, levity, inertia, momentum, friction, stress and tension.
This handout gives students an in-depth orientation to effective peer review in the context of a poetry writing workshop. It offers guidelines, statement starters, and a checklist of language elements to consider when giving feedback to a fellow student writer. The resource is geared toward beginners or students who have a difficult time discussing one another's written work in a productive way.
This lesson provides teachers with support for using text-dependent questions to help students derive big ideas and key understandings while developing vocabulary from the series of poems, Danitra Brown Leaves Town. Danitra and Zuri are two city-girls and best friends, and Danitra goes away to her auntĺäĄ_s house for the summer. These poems tell a story about how the girls stayed in touch by writing letters to each other, and how they discovered that they could have fun apart from one another while still remaining friends.
In this online tool, students can learn about and write diamante poems, which are diamond-shaped poems that use nouns, adjectives, and gerunds to describe either one central topic or two opposing topics (for example, or ). Examples of both kinds of diamante poems can be viewed online or printed out.
This class investigates theory and practice of digital or new media poetry with emphasis on workshop review of digital poetry created by students. Each week students examine published examples of digital poetry in a variety of forms including but not limited to soundscapes, hypertext poetry, animation, code poems, interactive games, location-based poems using handheld devices, digital video and wikis.
Genius.com is a crowd-sourced, living-document website in which users annotate all types of texts, including poems, novels, song lyrics, and plays. In this resource, users see annotations of "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening." This resource could be used in a variety of ways: as a model for annotation, as a tool for deep analysis of Frost's poem, or as a spring board into collaborative annotation (either on this website under an educator log-in or on a collaborative Google Document).
After listening to the read aloud Mr. Brown Can MOO! Can You?, students listen for sounds that can be heard in their classroom. They continue their learning about sound words by exploring selected websites and recording what they hear on a chart. Those sounds words are then used to create original cinquain poems.
Students shape up their reading, writing, and listening skills in this lesson by creating original diamante, acrostic, and shape poems about science.
This unit covers 4 types of poems and a culminating activity to wrap up the lesson. It covers haiku, cinquain, diamante, and acrostic poems. It is listed as being for 7th grade, however, it can be tweaked to fit grades 4 - 8.
See the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial wall in Washington D.C. through the eyes of war veteran and contemporary poet Yusef Komunyakaa. In this video segment from Poetry Everywhere, Komunyakaa reads his poem Facing It.
This lesson uses the lyrics from The Sound of Music song, "My Favorite Things" as a basis for having students explore idea development and word choice in creating poems using the model of My Favorite Things. Students also do a close read of When I Was Five to begin thinking about how our preferences for things change throughout our lives. Included with the lessons are models of student work from grades four to twelve. Lessons also include types of rhyme and specific word choices. Teachers can choose to use all or some of the lessons.