National Poetry Month
Last year, the EDSITEment-reviewed Academy
of American Poets asked the public to vote on their favorite American poet.
The verdict was decisive: Langston Hughes. In recognition of this poet's enduring
popularity, as well as the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Academy has created
a special feature on Langston Hughes
as the focus of its celebration of National Poetry Month. EDSITEment has followed
suit with a lesson, "The
Poet's Voice: Langston Hughes and You," in which students write journal
entries and discuss poems to learn about the qualities that make Hughes's voice
distinctive, forceful, and memorable.
Reading Langston Hughes is doubly apropos this April, which has also been designated
Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM); you can find information and teaching materials
related to JAM at the newly inaugurated Smithsonian
Jazz site. As noted in the student-oriented biography
of Hughes available from America's
Library (a link on the EDSITEment-reviewed American
Memory), for him "jazz and blues expressed the wide range of black America's
experience, from grief and sadness to hope and determination." You can also
find an EDSITEment lesson plan related to jazz, Jazz
and World War II: A Rally to Resistance, A Catalyst for Victory.
Another American poet of enduring popularity, Robert Frost, is also the subject
of an EDSITEment lesson, “Poems
that Tell a Story: Narrative and Persona in the Poetry of Robert Frost.”
Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" tells an invitingly
simple story; but as we read and reread the poem, we are drawn into questions
and mysteries. In this lesson, students explore such mysteries in journal entries
that build upon narrative hints in poems chosen from an online selection of
Frost's most frequently anthologized and taught works.
Deriving pleasure from the sounds of poetry is also the focus of a third EDSITEment
lesson, “Listening
to Poetry: Sounds of the Sonnet.” At the heart of the lesson are its
seven innovative "sound experiments," designed to help students understand how
form, meter, and rhythm all combine to shape our experience of poetry, and the
meanings we derive from it. After some preliminary sound experiments with Lewis
Carroll's nonsense poem, "Jabberwocky,"
the lesson turns to Shakespeare's Sonnet
29, a model of how the sonnet form, with its dense knitting together of
sound and meaning, can suggest an astonishing variety of emotional effects.
For a more global exploration of poetry, see “Arabic
Poetry: Guzzle a Ghazal!;” Japanese poetry, “Tanka?
You’re Welcome!”, “The
World of Haiku;” “Charles
Baudelaire: The Poet of Sickness and Evil,” and “Edward
Lear: Limericks and Nonsense.”
For younger students, EDSITEment offers a variety of lessons on poetry. Several
of these units feature a special focus on writing skills and the writing process:
"Can You Haiku?"
(grades 3-5), "Writing
Poetry Like the Pros" (grades 3-5), and "All
Together Now: Collaborations in Poetry Writing and Recitation" (grades K-2).
Another poetry lesson designed for grades K-2, "Play
With Words: Rhyme & Verse," uses bouncy rhythms and catchy rhymes to develop
skills related to language usage, listening, vocabulary acquisition, and auditory
memory, while also fostering an understanding of thematically related concepts.
The poet T.S. Eliot archly and glumly observed that "April is the cruelest month";
for students of poetry, it may also be the busiest month. Despite all the cultural
activity we have already packed into this month for you and your students, EDSITEment
has not neglected to recognize April 23, the Bard's birthday, with two lessons
on Macbeth for grades 9-12. In "Shakespeare's
Macbeth: Fear and the 'Dagger of the Mind'," students perform a wordless
version of the "banquet scene" in Macbeth in order to learn how Shakespeare
dramatizes fear; and in "Shakespeare's
Macbeth: Fear and the Motives of Evil," students use an online search engine
to discover clues to the motives behind Macbeth's precipitous descent into evil.
Introduce your students to additional Shakespeare plays in other EDSITEment
lesson plans: “Shakespeare's
Othello and the Power of Language,” “Hamlet
and the Elizabethan Revenge Ethic in Text and Film.” April also signifies
the season when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love, as extolled
in the lesson on his most romantic tragedy, “You
Kiss by the Book: SHakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.”
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