Adapting and Adopting in Teaching Poetry

I am a huge advocate of using other people's ideas in my classroom. Why re-invent the wheel when others have already done it, and done it better than I could have, considering the time constraints of being a full time teacher, department head, mother, wife, and friend? So during this month's Poetry Reading unit, I have used ideas from different sources to enhance my lessons.

• Poetry Madness: The idea for a poetry recitation "tournament" came from NCTE's March Madness Poetry Tournament, which sets students up in brackets modeled from the NCAA Basketball tournament. Instead of holding to the original 64 poems, paired off with one winner per day, then a 32 poem next round, etc. until the final two are chosen, I hold the numbers down to the number of students in my class. The first round requires each student to pick a poem to perform, grouped in 3 or 4 poem competitions (this keeps middle schoolers from feeling like they are The Loser if there are 2-3 others who also didn't get picked as the winner). Students in the round perform their poem using effective pace, volume, and expression, and the class votes for the poem they think is the best. Each winner of these rounds goes to one of two semi-final rounds, also grouped in 3-4 poem competitions. Once each class gets down to the final 2, we hold an all-8th grade final competition, with 8 poems and 3 winners. The purpose of this non-graded activity is to expose students to a variety of poetry, practice poetry recitation before the graded Poetry Slam at the end of the Poetry Writing unit, and to inject a fun, positive spin on reading poetry.
• Teaching lyrics with Katy Perry's "Firework": Lyrics is one of the forms of poetry to teach in the 8th grade curriculum. Of course there are hundreds, even thousands of song lyrics to choose from for this, but why should I spend hours picking one and figuring out how to teach it when Tracee Olman already did it for me? Her lesson on teaching Figurative Language and Poetic Devices is complete with a student handout and teacher answer key at my fingertips. I used it first to look at the structure of song lyrics, teaching words such as verse, chorus, refrain, bridge, and coda. I also used it to teach different kinds of rhymes: true rhyme, slant rhyme, and internal rhyme. With the song laid out so neatly in numbered lines and clustered stanzas, it was easy to identify the different parts of the song and where the different kinds of rhymes were found.

During the Poetry Writing unit, coming up next week, I'll be borrowing lessons from Ralph Fletcher and Sara Holbrook. Thanks, great teachers out there in the world, for sharing your ideas for me to adopt  and adapt!