Lesson Plans

By Aria Pahari

Using the Poetry Centered podcast format as a model, students will select a poem from Voca and prepare a brief introduction articulating why they chose the poem, allowing “listeners”—in this case their classmates—to experience the poem through their curation.

By Julie Swarstad Johnson

Students will reflect on things that give them strength in times of struggle. The group will create a collaborative poem inspired by Juan Felipe Herrera's "Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way," a bilingual poem that mixes English and Spanish. 

By Sylvia Chan and Sarah Kortemeier

Students will use the refrain as a technique to help them explore their experiences of fear and of power, reflecting on how the two might be connected. The literary model for this lesson plan is Douglas Kearney's "No Homo." 

By Sarah Kortemeier

Students will write a poem that features a volta (a change in the poem's argument), using Ada Limón's "What I Didn't Know Before" as a model. 

By Sarah Kortemeier, Mary Carol Combs, and the students of TLS 641

Students will reflect and write creatively on themes of language and migration, using Javier Zamora's poem "Let Me Try Again" as a model.

By Sonja Fordham and Sarah Kortemeier

Students will draft a literacy narrative poem, modeled on Lucille Clifton’s poem “lucy one-eye,” in which they create themselves as literary characters. This lesson is designed as an introductory activity for a unit on literacy narrative and/or memoir.

By Matthew John Conley and Sarah Kortemeier

Students will explore the effects of line endings by discussing lineation in an existing poem and generating lineated poetic text. Students will also listen to and transcribe poetry.

By Sarah Kortemeier and Ryan Winet

Students will use assonance to reinvigorate and examine their relationship with a familiar place.

By Sonja Fordham and Sarah Kortemeier

Students will create a list of “little-known facts” that a fictional or non-fictional character might use as a persuasive strategy in the creation of a public argument.

By Matthew John Conley and Sarah Kortemeier 

Students identify rhetorical devices in a single poem and analyze the rhetorical situation of poetry (and poetry readings); using these ideas, they will also create and perform a piece of poetic text that illustrates an encounter between two characters with a stake in a controversy.

By Sarah Kortemeier and Julie Lauterbach-Colby

Students use prompts drawn from Roger Bonair-Agard's "allegory of the black man at work in the synagogue" to write about the identities they inhabit.