teaching

Poems to celebrate Black History Month

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Today’s post is brought to you by educator extraordinaire and guest author, Cait Hutsell. Cait is a high school ELA teacher in North Central Florida. She has almost exclusively taught freshmen for seven years, but has also taught AP Lang, Yearbook, and sophomore English as well. Her superpower is reading ridiculously fast; she finished 164 books in 2018! Cait is currently vacillating between Masters programs and is a mom of one four year old, with another coming soon. Cait is involved in and supports #TeachLivingPoets, #DisruptTexts, #educolor, #ProjectLitChat, and #ClearTheAir. You can follow her on Twitter at @caitteach and see her original tweet thread with these poems; you can also check out her blog at teachlikeasquirrel.com.

black-history-month

“Southern Gothic” by Rickey Laurentiis (poem link)

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Source: Poetry (November 2012)

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Get your students engaged with poetry collections with this hands-on hexagon activity!

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Today’s post is brought to you by guest author Tia Miller. Tia teaches AP Literature, AP Language, AP Seminar, and Dual Credit English at Chapmanville Regional High School in southern West Virginia.  She is currently working on her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction from Marshall University.

This past semester, inspired by Melissa Smith and other awesome teachers in my PLN and encouraged by some extra money to spend on books for my classroom, I decided to teach my first poetry collection. Mind you, the very notion of reading a poetry collection, personally, was a rather exceptional idea for me, much less the attempt to teach one, but I took the leap anyway and found an exciting new addition for my curriculum. Continue reading →

#TeachLivingPoets Gallery Walk

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Today’s blog post comes from Carrie Mattern, a high school ELA teacher in Flint, MI who has taught in Flint for the last eleven years and in Brown City, MI for her first four years of teaching. At Flint Carman-Ainsworth, Carrie greets students as freshmen in English 9 and sends them out into the real world after completing English 12. She loves to read, write, and do what most teachers do on their snow days—watch cooking shows in sweats while dreaming of becoming a travel writer.

After finding Clint Smith’s work last year on Twitter, and finally becoming a member of #TeachLivingPoets last spring, I decided that this year my weekly writing (more on that another day) would be based on all living poets with my English 12 seniors. Last year I dabbled with mostly living poets, but this year I wanted to disrupt the canon and allow students more depth with their connections and more relevance to their world. So with that stated, #TeachLivingPoets is a part of my daily classroom lessons and I have never, ever had someone is class yell, “Yay! FInally!” when I announced this philosophy to the class this fall. Continue reading →

“If They Should Come For Us” by Fatimah Asghar – #TeachLivingPoets chat archive & ideas for teaching

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9780525509783Teachers from all over the country gathered together virtually to discuss Fatimah Asghar’s poem “If They Should Come For Us” from her collection If They Come For Us (Penguin Random House, 2018). I taught this poem to my on-level American Lit juniors and AP Literature seniors the week prior to the chat, and found it to be an extremely successful poem with my students, offering them opportunities for rich conversation and deep analysis. This post will provide you with an archive of the chat, and an explanation of how I went about teaching the poem in my classes. Continue reading →

Finding the Perfect Match: Poetry Blind Dating

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Today’s #TeachLivingPoets post is brought to you by guest writers, Kristin Dreyer and Nikki Lehman, co-teachers at Chantilly High School in Chantilly, Virginia. They have been teaching at Chantilly for the past 18 years and have co-taught together three years throughout the course of their careers; this year they are embarking on an English 10 journey for the first time. They enjoy collaborating and taking risks in their teaching— challenging each other to move beyond their comfort zones! You can follow them on Twitter @CHS_writer and @kdreyer12.

black logoWhen our 10th graders walked into class last week, they were confused—and intrigued— by the tablecloths, electric candlelight and mints at their tables.

“Are we having a fancy dinner?” one of them asked.

“Sort of.” We smiled knowing we had piqued their interest before we had even begun to read a line together. Continue reading →

Highlights reel of #THEBOOKCHAT and #TeachLivingPoets chat on José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal

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cit ill#THEBOOKCHAT #TeachLivingPoets #aplitchat UNITE!

Last week, several Twitter chat groups united to discuss José Olivarez’s new book Citizen Illegal (Haymarket Press, 2018). The chat was moderated by Adrian Nester, Scott Bayer, Joel Garza, and me, and educators and poetry readers from all over the country participated. This post will attempt to curate our chat and share some of the highlights that are useful if you are considering teaching Citizen Illegal in your class.  Continue reading →

Teaching a poetry collection with Clint Smith’s Counting Descent

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Today’s #TeachLivingPoets post comes from Adrian Nester, educator extraordinaire with 17 years’ experience in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. She is passionate about equity in rural education and the power of Twitter. She currently teaches AP Literature, English 11, and Journalism. She is also a T-ball coach, Interact sponsor, and Sunday school teacher in her spare time. She enjoys traveling, spending time with her family, reading, and playing sports. Read more about Adrian’s journey on her blog The Learning Curve.

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After studying Clint Smith’s Counting Descent with #thebookchat, I knew that I had found the first poetry collection that I was going to teach. Teaching an entire collection of poetry was something that I had considered, but did not see the full benefits from until reading and working through Smith’s Counting Descent from start to finish.

How to get started Continue reading →

A poem with heart

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Teach Living Poets LogoToday’s post will provide a lesson, inspired by the body, that has students free-writing, reading several mentor text poems, viewing a video performance of a mentor text poem, and finally writing a poem. My students had fun with this lesson, and produced impressive work! In all, it took us about three 50-minute class periods to get through. Another couple of days could be added on if you decided to workshop their poems in class.  Continue reading →

A #TeachLivingPoets unit

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Earlier this week, the third installment of the #TeachLivingPoets Twitter chat dropped. The August 28th chat was hosted by Susan Barber, who teaches in Atlanta public schools. Clint Smith’s poem “There Is a Lake Here,” which is the last poem in his collection Counting Descent (Write Bloody, 2016), was our focus as the common text for the chat.  There were so many innovative ideas brought up by various educators all around the country who participated in the chat, and this post is going to sort them all out into an organized poetry unit you could teach in your classroom.  Continue reading →