Today, students will get their "first" exposure to free-verse poetry. While it's their "first" exposure, the diligent quotation marks are not without cause. They've read all of Inside Out and Back Again during our refugee unit, and that book is a master class in free-verse poetry. Today will mark our students' first exposure to poetry through the lens of a poet. They'll travel to and stop at numerous stations. At each station, they'll read and respond to the poem using what's known as an "It Says, I Say, So" protocol, and at the end of class, they'll answer a few questions on a Google Form to summarize today's learning. 

Today, we'll learn and practice one of the most important skills in any poet's toolbox: the ability to "show" an audience details instead of "telling" them those details. Picture the difference between a coworker "telling" you that their cousin got married over the weekend, and actually attending a wedding, and watching two people who love each other celebrate their union with everyone the love the most... It's a significantly different experience. They'll look at some informational Slides first, and then rock some JamBoard sorting.

​If you boil everything down, and distill it to the finest possibility, line breaks are the single, most important difference between prose and poetry. In prose, we only hit "enter" to start a new paragraph. With a poem, we intentionally hit "enter" frequently, and painstakingly plan when that "enter" should happen. [Return] for all you Mac users out there... Today, we'll start class with an informational Slides presentation explaining how to use line breaks intentionally in free-verse poetry. Then, naturally, we'll practice adding line breaks to prose to create rudimentary poetry.  

Welcome to "The Karpie Method of Writing Free-Verse Poetry!" It's a foolproof algorithm that turns simple sentences into simply beautiful poetry! Today, students will look at the Slides linked to the right (of if they'd prefer, they can watch the video embedded below). That's it! For once, there is no check for understanding! Just watch and reflect. I was feeling generous on a Friday.

I know that poetry slams are the butt of every comedian's jokes, but poems need to sound beautiful, or discordant, or dull. Unlike an essay or a story, a poem's sound needs to match it's topic, and to make that happen, you need to employ sound devices. Today, students will be exposed to a series of sound devices, and then, we'll move into a sorting activity during which students sort examples of sound devices under their definition. They'll practice adding sound devices into the prose to which they added line breaks yesterday.  

Greetings! The overwhelming feedback I've gotten from students is that it's very hard keeping up with the work on days that they don't see their teacher. I'm keeping it simple today. Students will watch the video of me teaching them all about alliteration and assonance, and then they'll answer a simple Google Question on Classroom. It will ask: what is alliteration and assonance, and why would a poet use them?