Jaime R. Wood

Jaime is a poet and a teacher whose love for words can be traced to her first exposure to Nikki Giovanni’s Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day as a small child. She has taught in a variety of classrooms from an alternative charter school that adopted the Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound philosophy as its basis for teaching students without textbooks or grades to college composition courses at Colorado State University while completing her master’s degree. She is currently completing an MFA in poetry at Eastern Washington University, where she teaches composition. In addition to writing lesson plans, Jaime contributed material to the Summer Activities section of the site.

Jaime is a member of NCTE and the Colorado State University Writing Project. She is the author of Living Voices: Multicultural Poetry in the Middle School Classroom (NCTE, 2006).

Lessons on ReadWriteThink

Building Vocabulary: Making Multigenre Glossaries Based on Student Inquiry (6-8)
This lesson builds vocabulary and encourages active reading by allowing students to choose their own vocabulary words from a text that the class reads. In order to help students absorb and comprehend these new words, they create multigenre glossaries that can then be used as a classroom resource.

Color of Silence: Sensory Imagery in Pat Mora’s Poem “Echoes” (6-8)
Moving from personal experience to practical application, students use their senses to discover new ways to read and write. Pat Mora’s poem “Echoes” is used to demonstrate that our senses are powerful tools for literary analysis and comprehension.


Discovering Memory: Li-Young Lee’s Poem “Mnemonic” and the Brain (6-8)
In this cross-curricular poetry and biology lesson, Li-Young Lee’s poem “Mnemonic” is used to explore how memory works. Students learn about memory by doing a memory-writing exercise, studying the brain to understand how it affects memory, reading Lee’s poem “Mnemonic,” and creating multigenre projects to demonstrate their understanding of memory.

Entering History: Nikki Giovanni and Martin Luther King, Jr. (6-8)
Nikki Giovanni’s poem “The Funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr.” is paired with Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, taking students on a quest through time to the civil rights movement. After completing student-centered vocabulary activities, students perform the speech readers’ theater style and synthesize their learning by writing reflections.

Grocery Store Scavenger Hunt: Researching Nutrition to Advertise for Health (6-8)
Students learn about the foods they eat, define food label terms, and research healthful alternatives in order to create advertisements for healthful, tasty foods. In preparation for developing their own advertisements, students analyze published advertisements to better understand how companies use persuasion to market products to specific audiences.