Name: Poetry: A Crash Course
SKU: 6530570f9c7f144d9511a4e8
Price: 39.99 USD
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About this resource

What's inside this resource

Poetry: A Crash Course - An Effective Teaching Resource

Poetry: A Crash Course is a powerful, adaptable teaching resource, beneficial for educators in diverse educational environments ranging from public school classrooms to homeschooling setups. This unit serves as an enrichment tool for poetry studies, especially in scenarios where teaching time might be limited.

Six Distinct Lessons

Introduction to the fundamentals and appreciation of poetry.
Wide range of unique writing styles.
Easily applicable in whole group instruction, small group discussions or individual homework assignments.

'What is Poetry?' Activity

An essential component that cultivates foundational understanding for learners. The packed unit expands into activities such as 'Meter This!' and 'Tabloid Ballads', providing students with creative engagement with poetic structures while offering assessable outputs.

Dynamism and Innovation within Unit

The 'Spy Poetry' and 'No One Resists The Jabberwocky' lessons provide interactive ways to involve students in poetical creations and recitations while the feature facet titled 'Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery'nudges learners into demonstrating their understanding through mimicry of known works. To lighten up education's often strenuous hours come amusing intermissions like ‘Is Your Dog Possessed?’ and ‘Radio Code Words’.

A Traditional Quiz Closing

The unit rounds off with a traditional poetry quiz serving both evaluation or grading purposes. Designed aptly for grades 8 through to grade 12,

Coverage Across Language Arts Areas:

Poetry Studies
Creative Writing Skills Development

Format and Accessibility

In a convenient zip file format, Poetry: A crash course is an accessible resource designed for easy use.

The Ultimate Merge of Functionality & Creativity

If you need a flexible learning tool that both educates and inspires students about poetry within a limited timeframe, then prepare to explore Poetry: A Crash Course. It's practicality and creativity fashioned into one enriching educational package.

In the classroom

Teaching tips & learning objectives

Learning objectives

Identify the six basic metrical feet and scan a poem's meter.
Write an original ballad following traditional ballad-stanza conventions.
Compose a poem that imitates a mentor poem's stanza pattern, rhyme scheme, and style.
Define and identify literary devices such as metaphor, simile, alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia in a poem.

Teaching tips

The six lessons are designed to be taught in any order or independently, so pick and choose based on available time.
Use the Is Your Dog Possessed? tabloid article as the shared source material before assigning the ballad-writing task.
Assign the Traditional Poetry Quiz as a diagnostic before the unit or as a summative assessment after it, since it is labeled for either use.

Skills covered

Metrical scansion — students mark stressed and unstressed syllables to identify a poem's foot type and line length using Frost's poems.
Ballad composition — students write an original ballad in traditional stanza form based on a tabloid-style news story.
Poetic imitation — students mirror a mentor poem's stanza pattern, rhyme scheme, and style while writing about a new subject.
Literary device identification — students match terms such as metaphor, simile, alliteration, and onomatopoeia to examples within a poem.

Good to know

Questions teachers ask about this resource

What poems does the imitation lesson use as models?

Students choose between Robert Hayden's 'Those Winter Sundays' and John Ashbery's 'Paradoxes and Oxymorons' as the poem they imitate.

How does the Spy Poetry lesson use the phonetic alphabet?

Students write a poem with as many lines as letters in their name, using one NATO Radio Code Word per line to spell their name phonetically.

How does the Jabberwocky activity work?

Students highlight the nonsense words in Lewis Carroll's poem, replace each with a real word of the same part of speech, and let a new subject emerge before rewriting the poem.