Performing Poetry
National Poetry Month is a great time for students to learn how to dramatize
poems, creating special effects in performance, both in the classroom and beyond
the walls of the school. These lesson plans and classroom-ready resources suggest
ways to bring performance to your exploration of poetry.
- A Bear of a Poem: Composing and Performing Found Poetry (E)
Invite students to look for writing that inspires them—their favorite words, phrases, and sentences. Using words from their list, students create and perform a class poem with this ReadWriteThink lesson plan.
- "Joyful
Noises: Creating Poems for Voices and Ears" (E)
Read this Language Arts article for details on a poetry project
in which students read and perform poems, then write and perform their
own poems for two voices.
- "Audience
and Revision: Middle Schoolers Slam Poetry" (M)
See how a poetry "slam" (a contest in which
people perform their original poems and listeners cast votes for their favorites)
made vivid for students the need to write for an audience and
to revise, as outlined in this Voices from the Middle article.
- Acrostic Poems (M-S)
Ask students to choose words that have been particularly meaningful to them over the course of the school year. Using this ReadWriteThink interactive, students can compose and publish acrostic poems based on these words. Set up a poetry slam or poetry reading for students to share their work with one another.
- "Performance:
Beyond the Boundaries" (M-S)
Check out Chapter 12 of the new NCTE book Wordplaygrounds:
Reading, Writing, and Performing Poetry in the English Classroom,
to find poetry exercises that go beyond the walls of
academic disciplines and then suggest ways of organizing public performances
that take students beyond the walls of the school as well.
- "Out
Loud: The Common Language of Poetry" (S)
Lead students back to the written
poem with a renewed sense of connection and understanding with this
secondary workshop on slam poetry, from English Journal.
- "Using
Performance as an Interpretative Strategy in Teaching Robert Browning’s 'My Last Duchess'" (C)
Use role-playing, dramatic monologues, and tableaux vivant to
interpret Robert Browning's poem "My Last Duchess" in a
literature class, as explained in this Teaching English in the Two-Year
College article.
For more ideas for teaching poetry, see the Poetry Teacher Resource Collection, which includes links to additional articles,
lesson plans, and other resources.
NOTE: Free access to journal articles mentioned in this Inbox is provided
for 21 days. After this free access period expires, articles are available
to journal subscribers only. This Inbox Idea was published 04-11-2006.
Initials in annotations indicate academic level of the resource (E=Elementary,
M=Middle, S=Secondary, C=College, G=General).
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