I’m a couple days late on this, but I wanted to create something new. Something fun and creative that I haven’t tried yet with poetry in my classroom because I think this poem deserves it. A new, creative activity for a New Year’s poem.

Use this handout with the text of the poem to give to your students for this lesson.

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: