ALEX Resources

Title: Writing for Catharsis: How Do We Survive?
Description: This lesson is an internet-based inquiry into the Virginia Tech Massacre and Nikki Giovanni’s poetic response. This lesson ties informative reading and inquiry with the craft of poetry and the role of poetry as catharsis. Students will also understand firsthand the  difference in reading a poem and the experiencing it as a public performance.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (7) 7:

Title: Interactive Poetry - Learning Poetic Elements and Structure Through Exploration
Description: This is an online exploration poetry lesson.  Students will navigate through the interactive PowerPoint presentation and complete different tasks while acquiring knowledge on the various aspects of poetry. This is a College- and Career-Ready Standards showcase lesson plan.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (7) 5:

Title: Analyzing and Recreating Poetry with William Wordsworth
Description: This language arts lesson incorporates collaboration and analysis of poetry. The students will utilize drawing and analysis. The lesson also incorporates synthesis by having the students recreate Wordsworth's poem.The students will recreate personal photos on Aviary to make them more vivid.    
Standard(s):

Title: All About Us: Writing and Presenting Poetry
Description: In this lesson students write a poem about their class and classmates. Students then transfer their poems to individual presentation slides which are combined with their classmates' slides to create a class slideshow presentation. This presentation can be printed to create a class ABC book.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (7) 5:

Title: The Reading Performance: Understanding Fluency Through Oral Interpretation
Description: Students discuss prosody, gain a new appreciation for literature intended for oral performance, and participate in activities that instill the value of technology in shaping their appreciation of literature.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (8) 35:

Title: Cosmic Oranges: Observation and Inquiry Through Descriptive Writing and Art
Description: Students will eat up this lesson about oranges as they practice the skills that help them investigate and make detailed observations for descriptive purposes.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (8) 40:

Title: Can It Be?
Description: In this lesson, one of a multi-part unit from Illuminations, students participate in activities in which they focus on connections between mathematics and children s literature. They listen to the story The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, and then explore and interpret the concept of averages.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (8) 9:

Title: In the Poet's Shoes: Performing Poetry and Building Meaning
Description: Students take poetic license when they interpret William Carlos William's poem '' The Red Wheelbarrow'' to help create a poem of their own.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (8) 35:

Title: Analyzing Advice as an Introduction to Shakespeare
Description: Popular culture provides an introduction to Shakespeare's poetic devices in this lesson, which asks students to explore an excerpt from Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (8) 9:

Title: Using the Four-Square Strategy to Define and Identify Poetic Terms
Description: How do poets play with language? Students will explore some answers to this question as they search through poems for examples of alliteration, assonance, simile, and rhyme.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (8) 28:

Title: The World of Haiku
Description: In this lesson, from EDSITEment, students explore the traditions and conventions of haiku, comparing this classic form of Japanese poetry to a related genre of Japanese visual art and composing haiku of their own.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (8) 9:

Title: Modeling Reading and Analysis Processes with the Works of Edgar Allan Poe
Description: Explore reading strategies using Edgar Allan Poes The Raven and other works. Students read Poesworks in both large- and small-group readings then conclude with a variety of projects.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (8) 41:

Title: The Poet's Voice: Langston Hughes and You
Description: This unit of seven lessons, from EDSITEment, introduces students to a poet's voice. Students develop a general definition of voice in poetry, and analyze and appreciate the poetic voice of Langston Hughes in particular. Included are writing and discussion activities, in which students either write a poem expressing their own voice (as developed in a journal), or write about one of the qualities of Langston Hughes's poetic voice (as explored in class discussion).
Standard(s):
[SS2010] USS6 (6) 4:

Title: Poems That Tell a Story: Narrative and Persona in the Poetry of Robert Frost
Description: In this four-lesson unit, from EDSITEment, students read, discuss, and analyze selected poems by Robert Frost. The activities that make up this unit encourage students to draw inferences about a poem's speaker based on evidence contained within the poem and to gather evidence supporting those inferences.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (8) 29:

Title: The Statue of Liberty: Bringing the ''New Colossus'' to America
Description: In this lesson, from EDSITEment, students learn about the effort to convince a skeptical American public to contribute to the effort to erect a pedestal and to bring the Statue of Liberty to New York. The activities in this lesson guide students through an investigation of primary historical documents and an analysis of the poem The New Colossus, written by the nineteenth-century poet Emma Lazarus.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (8) 20:

Title: The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes
Digital Tool: The Highwayman video
Web Address URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCtJDbQwsZ4
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (7) 16:

Title: Writing Stylized Poetry
Digital Tool: Poem Workshop: Syllable Counter
Web Address URL: http://www.howmanysyllables.com/PoemWorkshop/
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (7) 5:

Title: Playing with Poetry the Interactive Way
Digital Tool: Poetry Idea Engine: A Writing With Writers Activity
Web Address URL: http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/poetry/poetry_engine.htm
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (8) 9:

Title: What Makes a Poem an Epic?
Description: This student interactive, from an EDSITEment lesson, prompts students to identify examples of the epic hero cycle from a story with which they are familiar.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (8) 30:

Title: Star Wars creator George Lucas was born in 1944.
Description: Students use the Hero's Journey interactive to describe how Luke Skywalker meets each stage of his journey, and then brainstorm other works that use the formula.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (8) 29:

Title: April is National Poetry Month!
Description: Students are assigned to be '' poets of the day'' and are provided several models to create, illustrate, and present their different poems to the class.
Standard(s):
[ELA2015] (8) 29: