Teachers First - Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers

Newspaper Blackout is a clever way to unlock the secret poetry hidden within any printed page. This Tumblr site shares examples (unmoderated, so preview before sharing in a classroom!). Poetry no longer needs to be a gray area; this activity makes it black and white! There are no gimmicks, no magic pens, and no camouflage paper, but this is certainly a tricky way to write a poem! All you need are newspapers and black markers. Hunt for and select a few words from each of the lines as you read a newspaper or magazine article. Remember to start with the title. Instead of the typical bottom-up approach to writing a poem by starting with a blank page and filling it with words, try this fresh, top down approach by starting with a page already crowded with words. Then use permanent markers to blacken out all the trivial words in each line until the poem appears. (Put something under your page so the ink does not bleed through on furniture!) Click Share your poem to learn how to upload your work to the site.

As a companion piece to the Shmoop literature site, reviewed here, this is a wonderful addition if you teach poetry. Shmoop provides students (and teachers) with so much more than summaries. This is a great site with a unique voice. It is written by Ph.D. and Masters students at top universities (such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc.). While the list of poems is always growing, it includes many of the poems and/or poets commonly studied in high school. These include some of Shakespeare's sonnets, Whitman, Coleridge, Shelley, Dickinson, Browning, Rich, Yeats, and others. Especially appealing are the "Intro" sections, which tell the background of the poem. These should interest students as it places a very human "face" on the poem and sets it in context for them. From the menu on the left find summaries, techniques, quotes, and study questions, this site also gives a "did you know?" page. It includes random trivia about the poet, poem, or topic, as well as a "sex rating" ("Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is rated "G"). This in itself will amuse students-- and amused students are likely to stay focused!

In addition to the literary content, some poems also have a photo slideshow that accompanies the poem and their authors. The slideshows would be great for readers who may need some assistance in comprehension or may just need something to sell the content and heighten their interest. While actually signing up (which is free) gives you the ability to "clip" files and keep them in a folder, you can access the majority of the information without signing up. Registration does require an email address. If you plan to have students register individually, you may want to create your own Gmail account with up to 20 subaccounts for each group of students (by code name or number) within your classes. Here is a blog post that tells how to set up GMail subaccounts to use for any online membership service.
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If you want to get students involved in listening to poetry, try this site featuring real life SOUNDS of poetry in both ballads and the blues. Ballads are traditionally taught as story poems and, while this site does that too, it makes ballads more relevant to the music that kids listen to today. Use this site to teach about meters (iambic triameter and iambic tetrameter) in ways that students can HEAR. The images of the short films are great, too. The site includes readings and singing of great, classic examples of ballads as well as some rarer film footage of great blues singers (ex: John Jackson singing "Steamboat Whistle" at Wolf Trap in 1997). There is a wide variety of tracks to choose from and the site includes lesson plans.

This is much more than a mere collection of contemporary limericks. It is rather a witty and provocative poetic commentary on politics, government, and economics. Original creations - inspired by what is in the news - are posted each day, and previous contributions can be perused by scrolling. It's acerbic ("Mr. Bush, we have heard you would banish our national anthem in Spanish...") and not for the easily offended, but it does provide a creative way to begin a class discussion on a hot topic. This is a personal blog site, so preview carefully before sharing with students.

Shel Silverstein's outside-the-box style of poetry has delighted students for years. Now, his website extends that wacky literacy to another medium and level. You may be tempted at most sites to skip the intro. Don't skip Shel's. Familiar entities walk across your screen welcoming you. Screen Savers, animated Shel-creature-people to enjoy, reproducibles, and more await your enjoyment. Click on Poetry Month to find more activities and games that you can use during April. Your students will chuckle at Shel's own reading and lively animation of several of his poems. This is a site to explore with your class.

Add this Kenn Nesbitt poetry site to your resource of kid-friendly poetry. This site is a treasure with podcasts, a rhyming dictionary, games, videos, tips and lessons for kid to write poetry. Browse through dozens of examples and choose a few to illustrate rhyme scheme, meter, or alliteration. These are not literary masterpieces, but they will engage your most resistant students, and perhaps inspire some original poetry. If your school blocks YouTube, the videos won't be viewable.