Let's Celebrate National Poetry Month

Spring is just around the corner -- and as April arrives, we have the perfect opportunity to share fantastic poems with our students during National Poetry Month.

I've asked a few of the Middle School Mob to share their favorite poetry resources.  Here are four great ideas for engaging your students with poetry:

A Poem that is Worthy of Missing Recess??

Caitlin and Jessica from EB Academic Camps want to share their students' love for Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Annabel Lee."

"You know it's an effective poem to teach when your students continue analyzing and talking about the content long after you have finished your lesson plans!"  They say.  "We just never thought it would be a poem from 1849 that our students would become obsessed with.  They honestly want to spend recess time with us to continue discussions, and we've even had a few students who have asked for their parents' thoughts about the poem.  Year after year, Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" does just that!  It is the PERFECT spooky poem to use around Halloween (but we've also taught it in April during National Poetry month, so honestly, it really doesn't matter!)

Click the link below to learn more about Caitlin and Jessica teach this spooky poem:

The Poe Poem our Students Love

Powerful Read Aloud

Lisa from Mrs. Spangler in the Middle  offers this great idea for introducing poetry to students.

"Love That Dog by Sharon Creech is a poem that is also a book," Lisa says.  "It's a free verse piece that gives voice to students' general aversions to poetry (it's "just" for girls, there's "nothing" to write about, poems are confusing and hard to understand, etc.) but then goes on to show that writing and reading poetry is not only enjoyable, but can also be a good way to deal with painful emotions and memories. It's a very powerful read that includes other famous poems along the way, but makes them relevant to today's middle schoolers.  It's so powerful when read aloud, and I can't recommend it enough!"

You can click the link below to read Lisa's blog post on her top 3 poetry picks:

Top Poetry Picks

Need Ideas?

Sharon from Classroom in the Middle  says, "One of the great things about April is the month-long celebration of all things poetry known as poetry month.  At this time of year, teachers can always use more poetry ideas and resources -- whether is it new poems to teach, fun poetry activities, or sites for kids to check out for an author study.  

Check out the links in this post for some great resources:

Poetry Month in the Classroom

30 Days of Poetry

Marypat from Just Add Students loves providing students with opportunities to write their own poems.  

"Students love writing a variety of poems," she says.  "from the simple to the complex.  And when they have a mentor poem to pattern their own writing after, the entire process is less scary and intimidating. From an acrostic to an ode -- students can play with poetry forms to express themselves and practice using language in new ways!"

Click on the link below to check out her 30 Days of Poetry resource:

30 Days of Poetry

What will be happening in your classroom to celebrate National Poetry Month?
How do you share poetry with your students? 
Let us know in the comments!

Here's to a month filled with great poetry!

Nine Back-to-School Ideas for Middle School Teachers

Heading back to school after the summer is exciting!  There are so many fresh ideas to try and ways to recharge your classroom and teaching.

The Middle School Mob has pulled together nine of our favorite back-to-school hacks, tips, and tricks.  We hope you'll find a few here that will get your year off to a great start!

Getting organized 

Michele of Michele Luck's Social Studies says that this is a must for new teachers. This bundle includes everything to get the year started and to keep it moving in the right direction! It walks you through classroom organization and helps you be prepared for dealing with classroom management, teacher evaluations, lesson planning, and more!

Do you need a seating chart?

Classroom organization is one of the first things that come to mind at back to school time. Desk or seating chart arrangement, along with ideas and planning for behavior management are priorities. A good seating chart template can be the saving grace for the middle or high school classroom.

Michele of Michele Luck's Social Studies shares some ideas about how to best use a seating chart.

Creative mini books

Lisa from Mrs. Spangler in the Middle says, "As a middle school teacher, I have to make 130 copies any time I need all of my students to have something. So if my syllabus is a couple of pages, that really adds up and I only get 2 cases of paper per year!

"This mini-book is just ONE sheet of paper for each student! And it gives the students something to do with the syllabus instead of just pretend to read it. ;) Not to mention it's creative and gives off a warm, fuzzy feel. :) "It's also completely editable so you can pre-print all the information from your syllabus on it or have students record the important information on it. Finally, it comes with a video to show you and your students how to assemble it."

You can find her paper-saving mini book here.

Poetry anyone?

Sharon from Classroom in the Middle says, "Poems make great short readings for the first days of school, and poems about school are a classic choice for beginning of the year activities in language arts classes. Here is a list of ten good titles, as well as a few links where you can find even more. The poems range from funny to serious. Some are about school and others are about perennial middle school topics."

Create an Escape!

Looking for a novel way to keep students thinking? Lyndsey from Lit with Lyns describes how she uses a digital escape room to engage her students at the start of the school year.

Are you going digital?

If so, Shana from Hello, Teacher Lady has some great tips for you.

Shana says, "Google Classroom has been the organizational hub of my classroom for the past few years, and I'm on a mission to share the love with as many teachers as possible. Since we're in the midst of back to school season, there's no better time to start saving time, paper, and sanity. If you've been wondering about the benefits of using Google Classroom, I've rounded up the top 12 reasons why Google Classroom should be your new BFF."

Flipping for this flipbook

Stephanie from The Marvelous Middle has a great idea for helping students keep track of their syllabus.

"The school year starts off smoothly with detailed classroom policies and procedures. A classroom syllabus explains how my classroom runs and the curriculum covered during the school year," Stephanie says.

"But, my students always seemed to lose this syllabus a few weeks into the school year. This flipbook syllabus solved this problem because it is sized to be glued right inside an interactive notebook. My students no longer lose this important information. It is always at their fingertips."

Building routines with task cards

Susie from Anchored in Reading shares this idea for how to use task cards to create routines in the classroom:

"This back to school resource proves valuable in many ways. Used as a bell ringer, these task cards help you build a routine while starting each class with students on-task and working. In addition, some of the concepts are review which may be beneficial for our students getting back into the swing of things! You could also use these task cards as exit slips or informal assessment."

Creating a yearlong plan

Marypat from Just Add Students shares this blog post with ideas of how to set up, create and use a yearlong plan for your ELA standards.

She says, "A yearlong plan will help you teach (all the) writing; it will save you time and energy — and help you remain accountable for what you’re expected to teach this year. When Sunday night rolls around and you're planning your week, a ylp is a lifesaver!  The lessons plans practically write themselves!  An additional bonus?  Great for Meet the Teacher night as well!"   You can find her free editable yearlong plans here.

So, what do you think?  What new ideas are you implementing this year?  Let us know in the comments below!

Here's to a fresh, new school year!

Using Lyrics As Poetry for Close Reading

Hi everyone! Stephanie from The Marvelous Middle here.

Since April is Poetry Month, it's the perfect time to bring music into your classroom. Middles love music and they LOVE talking about music. As Kelly Gallagher says, "You have to know stuff to be able to read stuff." Middles know music and you can use that to your advantage. Using lyrics as poetry is something that I do throughout the entire school year. By the time April rolls around, they are pretty good at analyzing lyrics. I use the three read process for close read. The first read focuses on Key Ideas and Details. The second read focuses on Craft and Structure. The third read focuses on Integrating Knowledge and Ideas. This is the same process we practice all year long.

This year I decided to change things up a bit. Instead of using popular songs the entire year, I used them to model the close reading process and students used them to practice on. These were songs they were familiar with and had some background knowledge already.

Jump forward to February...the perfect time for love songs! I pulled songs from multiple decades, making sure to include songs my middles weren't familiar with. I put together a set of love songs (that you can find in my TpT store) to use during class to increase their close reading skills. I wasn't sure how middles of 2016 would react to the "oldies" but the songs were a hit (pardon the pun)!! Not only did they use the process that we had practiced since school started, but I saw growth! They took text they were not familiar with previously and pushed themselves to analyze deeper than they had all year.  And they asked throughout March if I was going to bring more of the "oldies" in to class.

Being a HUGE baseball fan and knowing that April is also the month baseball starts, I searched for songs that were baseball related. Some of them I did not even know. This just made the process more interesting. My middles got to experience me modelling a close read on a song I was not familiar with. It was eye-opening for them. To see me struggle at points in the lyrics was shocking for them. "You mean a teacher struggles with some pieces of text, too?!!" "You mean you don't just have all the answers in a book somewhere and you have to figure it out like we do??!!" So once again, it was a great teachable moment for my middles and for me.

The moral of this story is meet your middles where they are comfortable, even if it's a place you may not be as comfortable. Pop songs of today are NOT my comfort zone. If we are asking them to step out of their comfort zone, shouldn't we? Using lyrics as poetry for close reading meets them exactly where they are comfy. Music is music in their opinion. It's not stuffy like poetry (even though as a teacher I don't believe this). It's normal for them to figure out what the song is saying, just don't remind them that it's really just poetry put to music. And better yet, enjoy the moment!

Poems for Assessment

Middle School students are often the most emotional, imaginative, and creative kids around.  They are struggling with all of the new life experiences that surround them, and more importantly, they are searching for a way to let it all out.  For some, writing poetry can be that release!

Poetry writing has long been an incredible form of therapy for the soul, but in our classrooms, it can also be a form of assessment.  With so many options for how to write poetry, it can be done in very effective ways to demonstrate student understanding or to show student processing of content or a subject-area concept.

Here are a few suggestions for using poetry in your class for assessment:

• When studying significant people, whether dead of alive, students can create fact filled Epitaphs or Biographical Poems.  Provide a template or allow students to research the purpose of each prior to writing, and set requirements to meet the standards of your course.
• Examine important events or subjects by using Haikus. This Japanese art form has long helped people connect their thoughts to events, and students can use this short format for writing concise summaries.
• Another great tool for examining time periods, unit topics, or themes is the Acrostic Poem.  This easy to use template format can help students detail their topics while processing and extending information into a cohesive flow.
• For the very creative, encourage the creation of a Shaped Poem, allowing art and knowledge to meet for an assessment like no other!

Whether you utilize templates or allow your students to free verse their way to your heart, the opportunity to write poetry for assessment may open doors for some students who have had challenges with writing in the past.  More importantly, it may be the encouragement some need to inspire them to learn and participate more in your class!

Happy Teaching!

Revamping TPCASTT

Hey there, everyone! So, because it's National Poetry Month, I thought it would be a great time to talk about how I use the TPCASTT strategy in my classroom and how that has evolved. Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar with this strategy, TPCASTT is an organized and structured way to help students analyze any kind of poetry. It has been my experience that asking students to analyze poetry without structure leads to confusion, frustration, and eventually a dislike for the activity in general. The TPCASTT strategy is the best way I have found to help students analyze poetry.

When I was in junior high and high school (and even a little in college), I was assigned poetry analysis assignments with a TPCASTT all the time. However, without directions, practice, guidance, and feedback I found myself scratching only the surface of the poems I was asked to analyze. When I became a teacher and saw that the same strategy was in my curriculum, I decided there had to be a better way to have students utilize it. I decided to give the old strategy a face lift.

Instead of just listing what each letter stands for and giving students a blank box, I decided to give more guidance and directions. As we all know, middle school students really rely on structure and very precise directions and so I kept that in mind as I tweaked this famous and frequently utilized graphic organizer. The biggest thing I decided to do was to add questions and comments that would guide students in their analysis. I also made more room for paraphrasing and broke the "Connotation" box into six smaller boxes to help students visualize the importance  and amount of literary elements in poetry.

I have found that, since doing this, my students comprehension of poetic texts have improved. I've also found that their willingness to participate in activities and assignments that come after the analysis of a poetic text because they are confident in their actual analysis. All in all, I really like this strategy for analyzing poetry in the classroom. I just think that, in the context of a middle school classroom, it needs a little extra structure and organization!

Below is a graphic I made for my classroom to help students remember what goes in each box of a TPCASTT! It's a quick reference guide that can be used by anyone! And if you're looking to use a ready-made TPCASTT organizer, instead of creating your own, head over to my TpT store! I have the above template available there!

I'll see you next month! Happy teaching!

Poetic Primary Sources: Using Poetry to Teach History

During National Poetry Month, we often think about reading or writing poems in our Language Arts classes, but poetry can be an incredibly valuable tool in the Social Studies classroom, as well.  After all, poetry has been around since the beginning of written word!

More importantly, according to the National Council for Social Studies, primary sources should be our go-to for informational text in the History classroom.  Primary sources offer us a first hand account of history, and can often provide perspectives (and biases) we cannot otherwise see. Poetic primary sources can open up doors to the innermost thoughts of individuals, and can help students examine time and place in a way other documents cannot, allowing emotion to come through in the sharing of historic times and events.

Here are just a few resources to help you make the most of National Poetry Month in your Social Studies Classroom:

• Poetry Soup has great listings of poems from all eras and all peoples.  Take a look at the many history-related poems to find a topic that works best in your class.
• Some of the greatest poetry is written in times of strife.  During WWII, incredible poets recorded their greatest experiences and fears during their internment in camps, both in American and Europe.  While the Japanese wrote haikus throughout history, the ones written during American Internment were written in English, yet are truly authentic in form.  Poems written during the Holocaust in Europe take on many forms, but are all strong in both emotion and visualization.  Find a great collection of all types of poetry from WWII at the WWII Poetry Site.
• During WWI, many soldiers wrote letters from the trenches.  Some of those wrote in poetic form, sharing their hopes and fears for their futures.  The Poetry Foundation has a very complete listing of resources that describe many aspects of the first world war.
• And if we are sharing historic poetry, we must go back to the original poets of Greece, and Homer was the best at detailing history in verse.  Examine Classical Literature and the poets that started it all at Ancient Literature. 
• Finally, Famous Poets and Poems has an amazing listing of poems from all times, including modern poets that examine current topics and current events.  Allow students to read Maya Angelou or Shel Silverstein to escape into the realities of the 20th century or the dreams of the 21st.

But reading poetry is not enough! Allow your students to report on history in poetic form.  Writing poetry can be informing, but also cathartic.  More importantly, it can be engaging, keeping your students learning through the month and beyond as you come closer and closer to the end of the year!

Happy Teaching!

Write a Sonnet to Celebrate 400 Years of Shakespeare!

This year marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death.  His first folio is on a 50-state tour in the United States.  Perhaps you will be able to see the exhibit in a town near you.

The folios, published in 1623, are credited with preserving 36 of Shakespeare's plays.  Of those plays, eighteen had never been published before.  Can you imagine our world without Macbeth or Julius Caesar?

But even if the first folio tour doesn't get you charged up, you can't deny the influence Shakespeare has had on the English language.  Read (and share with your students) Bernard Levin's clever "On Quoting Shakespeare" essay.  Or think about the movies (West Side Story anyone?) that adapt plots from Shakespeare's plays -- plots that we still find riveting 400 years later.  

While studying an entire play can be challenging and require more time that you may have available, you can introduce your students to Shakespeare through his sonnets.  He wrote 154 of them.  The language of the sonnets can be intimidating to students, but by using some basic poetry analysis tools, your students will be able to understand the content of the sonnet.  Not only that, so many of Shakespeare's sonnets are completely relatable to teens.  The agony and loneliness of Sonnets 29 and 30 could be written by a teen, and Sonnet 18 is beautiful!

Tools for Reading a Sonnet

1. Read it out loud.  Students will often struggle with the language, but if they are just listening for meaning, they can often get the big ideas rather than get hung up on details.

2.  Vocabulary.  Make sure your students have a clear understanding of any new vocabulary in the sonnet.

3.  Paraphrase.  This is the golden key to helping students understand poetry.  Ask them to "translate" the poem line by line, but also to connect what is happening throughout the sonnet.  Each line is linked to the next since the sonnet is building an "argument."

4.  Let your students figure out the form.  Rather than telling them, allow students to discover how the sonnet is put together.  Students should be able to identify the rhyme scheme (three quatrains and a couplet).  They may have more trouble with the meter, but that's where clapping out the accented syllables will help.  I wouldn't fret too much about making sure they can scan a poem or identify iambic pentameter.  The idea is to help students notice the rhythm of the language.

5.  Keep asking students to tell you what they notice -- you will find that they can not only understand the meaning of the poem, they will be able to figure out how it is constructed.  The one thing I did not allow my students to say was, "I don't get it"  because that means they've given up trying!

6.  Don't forget the turn.  The end of the sonnet is like a punchline.  What is the message, epiphany, resolution?  

Tools for Writing a Sonnet

1.  Choose a simple topic.  Any topic can be used -- adopting a pet, last Saturday's soccer game, my messy closet, what's in your lunchbox...help students choose a topic that has a clear beginning, middle, and end.

2.  Work backwards.  Once students understand the format of a sonnet, they can write their sonnet "backwards" by beginning with the end rhyme in mind.  This allows students to stop obsessing about what rhymes with "orange" and focus on what they want their sonnet to be about.

3.  Try for the turn.  The ending of the poem should resolve an issue or share an epiphany.  What do you want your reader to learn or understand after reading this sonnet?  

4.  Relax.  It's a sonnet! Writing one is a bit like doing a sudoku puzzle or completing a crossword puzzle.  Some of your students will really enjoy the challenge, and other won't.  But challenging students to write a sonnet is something they may never have the opportunity to try again!  You can be the teacher who introduced your students to a completely new form of literature!!  

You can tell by now, that I love sonnets (and all poetry, but that's the topic for another blog post!). I just hope that I've encouraged you to share a sonnet, and William Shakespeare, with your students!  There is still time to plan a party !  April 23 is his recognized birthday since there are only baptismal records and no birth certificates.  (Interestingly enough, it is also the date of his death.)

If you're looking for more detailed help, you can check out Sonnet 29 on my Teachers Pay Teachers store.   It will guide you every step of the way!

Enjoy sharing great literature and challenging writing experiences with your students!

Happiness always,