Using Animoto, a free Web 2.0 tool, students can develop short digital videos that include music, photos, video clips, and text as well as share their creations electronically.
Bringing Lessons to Life with Animoto
Performing Poetry
Performing poetry incorporates oral reading, literature, and the performing arts. This strategy can benefit content area readers, English language learners, or learners with special needs.
Risking Intensity: Reading and Writing Poetry with High School Students
Judith Michaels approaches the subject of the self at both the personal and practical levels, opening the world of poetry to her classes through carefully planned strategies.
Nikki Giovanni in the Classroom: "The same ol' danger but a brand new pleasure"
The first volume in the NCTE High School Literature Series, this small, practical book features primary source materials including many of Giovanni's poems reprinted in full, easily adaptable lessons and activities, and a resource section for students and teachers wishing to study Giovanni further.
Great Films and How to Teach Them
Costanzo offers high school and college teachers an updated, expanded edition that contains 80% new material on teaching film, including study guides of 14 new film with relevant ways to engage their students through a medium that students know and love.
Living Voices: Multicultural Poetry in the Middle School Classroom
Jaime Wood offers middle school English language arts teachers material for teaching poetry by Nikki Giovanni, Li-Young Lee, and Pat Mora; the text includes graphic organizers and other resources.
Teaching Poetry in High School
Albert Somers offers teachers a vast compendium of resources for teaching poetry in a highly accessible format.
Wordplaygrounds: Reading, Writing, and Performing Poetry in the English Classroom
O'Connor offers new approaches to teaching poetry in middle and high school with more than 25 writing activities that can constitute an entire course or work as individual lessons.
Getting the Knack: 20 Poetry Writing Exercises
Dunning and Stafford, both widely known poets and educators, offer this delightful manual of exercises for beginning poets.
Reading in the Dark: Using Film as a Tool in the English Classroom
In this practical guide, John Golden makes direct links between film and literary study by addressing reading strategies (e.g., predicting, responding, questioning) and key aspects of textual analysis.
Swish! Pow! Whack! Teaching Onomatopoeia Through Sports Poetry
Students explore poetry about sports, looking closely at the use of onomatopoeia. After viewing a segment of a sporting event, students create their own onomatopoeic sports poems.
Constructing New Understanding Through Choral Readings of Shakespeare
After reading The Tempest or any other play by William Shakespeare, students work in small groups to plan, compose, and perform a choral reading based on a character or theme.
All's Well that Sells Well: A Creative Introduction to Shakespeare
Students compare attending a performance at The Globe Theater with attending a modern theater production or movie. They then create a commercial for an Elizabethan audience promoting a modern product.
The Ten-Minute Play: Encouraging Original Response to Challenging Texts
Students use both analytical and creative skills to adapt passages from a novel with significant internal dialogue and conflict, such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, into a ten-minute play.
Color of Silence: Sensory Imagery in Pat Mora's Poem "Echoes"
Pat Mora's poem "Echoes" demonstrates that our senses are powerful tools for literary analysis and comprehension as students use their senses to discover new ways to read and write.
Polishing Preposition Skills through Poetry and Publication
Students deepen and refine their understanding of prepositions by reading Ruth Heller's Behind the Mask. They write preposition poetry and create a study guide using an online tool.
Cover to Cover: Comparing Books to Movies
Students compare and analyze novels and the movies adapted from them. They design new DVD covers and a related insert for the movies, reflecting their response to the movie version.
Analyzing and Comparing Medieval and Modern Ballads
Students explore the ballads genre by reading medieval ballads to deduce their characteristics, acting out the ballads, comparing medieval and modern ballads using Venn diagrams, and composing their own ballads.
Ekphrasis: Using Art to Inspire Poetry
In this lesson, students explore ekphrasis—writing inspired by art. Students find pieces of art that inspire them and compose a booklet of poems about the pieces they have chosen.