“We find it hard to settle our brains down,
Ada Limón
and poetry offers us that silence, that quiet space,
and allows us to reconnect with ourselves, with an idea, or with an emotion.”
Ada Limón is the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate and the 1st Latina to hold the position. Her work has also won the National Books Critics Circle Award and earned her a Guggenheim fellowship. Limón serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte and is the host of The Slowdown podcast. You can read more about Ada Limón here.
Poems of focus:
Skills of focus:
- Imagery
- Figurative Language
- Tone
- Theme
This lesson is fitting for both high school and middle school classrooms. Students will discover and explore Limón’s work via a mini poet study using 3 of her poems. You can find the full lesson here. The link will force you to make a copy of the Google Slides, so you can save them to your personal drive and edit them for your needs.
Today’s lesson is brought to you by Ann Cox. Ann has over 20 years of experience teaching high school English, including AP Lit, Creative Writing, and Speech. She also spent several years as a teacher consultant for the Illinois State Writing Project. In addition to the #TeachLivingPoets website, Ann has also written for ReadWriteThink and Moving Writers.
#TeachLivingPoets 