Teaching Poetry in High School

Students create poetry collections with the theme of "getting to know each other." They study and then write a variety of forms of poetry to include in their collections.

Students explore the ways that powerful and passionate words communicate the concepts of freedom, justice, discrimination, and the American Dream in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

Students read sonnets, charting the poems' characteristics and using their observations to deduce traditional sonnet forms. They then write original sonnets, using a poem they have analyzed as a model.

Students are assigned to be "poets of the day" and are provided several models to create, illustrate, and present their different poems to the class.