Amanda Gorman: Lesson for teaching “New Day’s Lyric”

Use this handout with the text of the poem to give to your students for this lesson. And, can we all just take a minute to appreciate that Amanda Gorman herself gave this lesson her stamp of approval?!

And everything you need is in this Google Slides presentation! Here’s a sneak preview of some of the Slides:

Here’s what I came up with when I annotated the poem along with my students. Gorman is truly a master at word play and sonics. This poem is so brilliantly subtle that everyone can understand it and meet the poem with their own experiences and backgrounds. And upon a closer look, we can discover the craft — the moves she makes poetically that draw us in and make us feel.

I was blown away at how many different visual interpretations my students had of the poem, and how insightfully they explained their choices! Here are just a few samples of how they saw “New Day’s Lyric”:

Thanks for reading! As always, please share your awesome poetry teaching ideas and student work (with their permission, of course) and tag it #TeachLivingPoets! If you would like to write a guest post for TeachLivingPoets.com, please DM me @melaltersmith or email me at msmith@lncharter.org.

Check out more lessons for teaching living poets: