Poetry Lessons for the classroom:

Performing Poetry (from NCTE inbox)

It's time to prepare for National Poetry Month, which takes place every April. Take advantage of this celebration by asking students to dramatize poems, both in the classroom and beyond the walls of the school. These lesson plans, texts, and classroom-ready resources suggest ways to bring performance to your exploration of poetry.

• A Bear of a Poem: Composing and Performing Found Poetry (E)

  Invite students to look for writing that inspires them – their favorite words, phrases, and sentences. Using words from their list, students create and perform a class poem with this ReadWriteThink.org lesson plan.

• Moving toward Acceptance through Picture Books and Two-Voice Texts (E)

  Using both picture and poetry books in this lesson plan, students discuss diversity in literature and in their school. Students then study, create, and perform two-voice texts that try to solve the problem of intolerance and move toward acceptance.

• “Audience and Revision: Middle Schoolers Slam Poetry” (M)

  See how a poetry “slam” (a contest in which people perform their original poems and listeners cast votes for their favorites) made vivid for students the need to write for an audience and to revise, as outlined in this Voices from the Middle article.

• Speaking Poetry: Exploring Sonic Patterns through Performance (S)

  Using their voices as interpretive instruments, students will gain a deeper appreciation of the art of poetry as they prepare a recitation of the frequently anthologized poem “Those Winter Sundays,” as described in this ReadWriteThink.org lesson plan.

• Performing Writing, Performing Literacy (C)

  This article reports on the first two years of the Stanford Study of Writing, a five-year longitudinal study aimed at describing as accurately as possible all the kinds of writing students perform during their college years.

• “From the Coffee House to the School House: The Promise and Potential of Spoken Word Poetry in School Contexts” (TE)

  Explore the curricular implications for listening and valuing words and the perspectives of others in this article from English Education.