How I Teach My End-of-the-Year Poetry Project

The last few days before summer vacation can be a slow painful countdown—or they can be an opportunity to try something new, get students working independently, and give teachers a break. It’s not that teachers are sick of their students (okay, maybe just a little bit) it’s that we’re all ready for something a little bit different. For me, that sometimes means finishing off the term with an engaging poetry unit. My End Of The Year Poetry Unit is

A List of Poems For Every Unit

One resource that I have always wanted as a teacher is a list of poems arranged by theme so I could easily find a great piece to add to any unit. Well, here’s that list. If you see a link in the title to the poem, that’s because I sell a resource for teaching that poem. (Think about it as a great choice if it’s nine o’clock on a Wednesday night and you’d rather go to bed than sit up

Why Do Teachers Look For Writing Prompts? (And What They Should Be Looking For Instead)

In doing a little keyword research for my Teachers Pay Teachers products and the guest blog posts that I write in hopes that people will find and buy those products, I have found that an often searched for term is “writing prompts.” I continue to be almost shocked that people just look for writing prompts, without any tie to content or units of study or texts. I don’t think, though, that they are simply looking for someone to give them

How To Teach Poetry

How To Teach Poetry April is National Poetry Month, and while I could happily spend hours analyzing a poem with a group of seventeen-year-olds, I know that not everyone feels that way. Poetry is not always an easy sell. Students might not have much experience with poetry, or they don’t like it, or they think that it’s going to be too hard. But by the end of my introductory unit, I have won (almost) all of them over. They look

poem of the week let america be america again

Poem of the Week: American Dreams, Struggle, and Unity

I don’t think that I will ever be able to hear the words “great” and “America” together again without cringing. And yet, I want to continue the discussion about how we can all achieve the American Dream. I guess that what I most want my students to understand about the place they live is this: It’s complicated. It’s not really about whether America was or ever will be great—it’s about looking at what does work and looking even more closely

6 Tips for Teaching Fake News: Digital Literacy Do’s and Don’ts

If you have students over the age of 16, they’ll be eligible to vote in the next presidential election. Will they have the information to make the best decisions for themselves and their country? If they’re making their choices based on fake news—or misinformation and disinformation—the consequences of those choices could hurt us all. You know that you need to teach your students to be more savvy consumers of digital information who are equipped with the correct tools for evaluating

Classroom Management: Why I Love a Good Jigsaw

Students moving around the room, talking to each other, sharing information, and teaching their peers—it’s sort of a teacher’s dream, and it’s what happens when I do a jigsaw activity with my students. I use a jigsaw in three of my content-heavy resources: my Fake News and Digital Literacy Unit, my Growth Mindset Unit, and my Elements of Poetry Unit. The basic idea of a jigsaw is that students learn a piece of the content and then teach that to

Classroom Management: Why We Freewrite

It’s kind of funny that as a teacher I can relearn the same lessons over and over again—I’ll forget how affective a strategy is or how crucial one step is—until I am brutally reminded when a lesson falls flat or an assignment turns out terribly. One of the lessons that I learn over and over is how important the freewrite is. Last year I was grading the midterm exams from my junior honors American Literature class, and there was one message that

Poem Of The Week: Opium Dreams and Author’s Intent

You know you have a good poetry lesson when it grabs students in the first days of school. One of my favorite and most effective poetry lessons of all time is my two-day lesson on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment.” It’s a great lesson because I get to employ some of my favorite comprehension strategies, and because I get students writing and thinking about big questions early on. (You can

Classroom Management: The Perfect Bellringer

Those first few minutes of a class are always hectic. Someone needs to go to the bathroom, someone else needs to get their missing work, and someone else needs to show me their newest poem about a fight they had with their mom this weekend and how they incorporated an extended metaphor to explain their pain. I’m expected to take attendance and submit it electronically ASAP. Not to mention checking homework, reviewing due dates and upcoming projects and tests.

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