Students explore what Carol Jago calls the place "where life and art intersect" by reading Nikki Giovanni's poem, "Nikki-Rosa," and then writing about childhood memories of their own.

Students investigate the effects of word choice in Robert Frost's "Choose Something Like a Star" to construct a more sophisticated understanding of speaker, subject, and tone.

Students select what they believe to be the most important word in a text that they have read and justify their choice using examples from the text.

This resource was created by Sandra Schueler, in collaboration with Dawn DeTurk, Hannah Blomstedt, and Julie Albrecht, as part of ESU2's Integrating the Arts project. This project is a four year initiative focused on integrating arts into the core curriculum through teacher education, practice, and coaching.

This resource contains a series of sample assignments including: second-hand source excerpts about civilization with critical questions, instructions for a project about art traditions in Asia, instructions for a project about imperialism with a written and visual component, and instructions for a document-based essay about imperialism.

Students use their five senses as a prewriting tool to guide their poetry writing as they compose free-form poems using imagery to describe a color.

This unit introduces students to a variety of poetic forms and elements, as they compile their own collections of poetry.

Students use themed graphic organizers to compose cinquain poems on topics common in the early elementary classroom.

Reinforce student understanding of parts of speech through the analysis of sample cinquain poems followed by the creation of original cinquains.

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we explore a variety of visual and written tools for self exploration and self expression. Through discussion, written assignments, and directed exercises, students practice utilizing a variety of media to explore and express who they are.

This semester, Contemporary Literature (21L.488) deals with Irish literature, a subject broad and deep. To achieve a manageable volume of study, the course focuses primarily on poetry and prose, at drama’s expense, and on living writers, at the expense of their predecessors. Each class session follows a discussion format, often with students assigned to lead-off or summarize the day’s topic.

One of the significant Irish poets and scholars of our time, Maire MacEntee, discusses the influences that led to her becoming a poet. (27 min)

Students write poems using rhyme and meter as they come to understand the mechanical concept of rhythm, based on the principle of oscillation, in a broader biological and cultural context, as seen in dance and sports, poetry and other literary forms, and communication in general. Note: The literacy activities for the Mechanics unit are based on physical themes that have broad application to our experience in the world — concepts of rhythm, balance, spin, gravity, levity, inertia, momentum, friction, stress and tension.

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

Students explore the idea of ńcrossing boundariesî through bilingual, spoken-word poetry, culminating in a poetry slam at school or in the community.

Students learn about personification by reading and discussing poems and then brainstorm nouns and verbs to create personification in their own poems.

This lesson provides teachers with support for using text-dependent questions to help students derive big ideas and key understandings while developing vocabulary from the series of poems, Danitra Brown Leaves Town. Danitra and Zuri are two city-girls and best friends, and Danitra goes away to her auntĺ䁥_s house for the summer. These poems tell a story about how the girls stayed in touch by writing letters to each other, and how they discovered that they could have fun apart from one another while still remaining friends.

What's that sound? Students participate in a Directed Listening-Thinking Activity (DLTA) using "The Tell-Tale Heart," make predictions, and respond in the form of an acrostic poem or comic strip.

Students learn about memory by doing a memory-writing exercise, studying the brain to understand how it affects memory, reading Li-Young Lee's poem "Mnemonic," and creating projects to demonstrate their understanding.