Famous Poets in the Classroom
Too often our English books present poetry lessons with doggerel intended only for the classroom. Fingerplays are fun and we want our students to write their own poetry, but there’s no reason not to introduce the works of great poets to kids.
These are the works that will stay in their minds and influence their own thinking and writing.
- Poetry for Young People: Maya Angelou
- Poetry for Young People: Carl Sandburg
- Poetry for Young People: Emily Dickinson
- Poetry for Young People: William Shakespeare
- Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes
- Poetry for Young People: Robert Frost
- Poetry for Young People: Lewis Carroll
- Poetry for Young People: Robert Frost
Now that you have some famous poems to work with, what should you do with them?
Learn something about the poet
We may not need to know who wrote “Five Little Monkeys” in order to enjoy it fully, but knowing something about the great poets, and about their lives and times, adds depth to our understanding of their work. Even when a poet is surprising or atypical for his or her time and place, that can be important information.
Books like Shakespeare for Kids: His Life and Times, 21 Activities let you examine the world of the poet fully, but it doesn’t hurt to turn kids loose and let them do some research. Add the important dates of the poet’s life to your classroom timeline, find his or her home town on the map, and think about what the world was like in that time and place. Also check out the University of Toronto’s Places of Poems and Poets.
Read the poem
Most poetry is intended to be read aloud. Hear more than one reading of each poem, since the nuances may be different, and encourage students to memorize short poems and recite them. Don’t think they can’t, either — kids who can recite whole scenes of movies and all the current commercial jingles can also recite poetry.
Analyze the poem
We don’t recommend telling students “what the author was trying to say.” We believe that the reader and poet together construct the meaning of a poem, and that it’s possible to get different things from a poem. Even if you don’t agree with us, consider giving students the opportunity to do their own thinking and analysis, since these are important skills. Our lesson on “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” by William Butler Yeats includes the kind of open-ended questions that can help students think about what a poem might mean. Our National Poetry Month Lesson Plans has a simple plan you can use to begin an analysis of any poem.
Create something with the poem
Have students choose a favorite line or two from a poem and create something with it. There are many possibilities:
- Use a graphics program or art supplies to create a poster. If you use a graphics program, you can then make a Pinterest page with all the posters.
- Write the lines on Shrinkable Plastic and use them to create jewelry.
- Make a large mosaic with bits of paper for your hallway.
Tech Lessons on Plants
When you have benchmarks for studying plants and for technology, save time by combining the two. Here are two ways to use some of our favorite tech tools to learn more about the plant kingdom.
Google Earth
- Plant a baby tree for your class at MyBabyTree and watch it grow — really– in Google Earth. This is an affordable way to get a real sense of connection with the great forests of the earth. The site has an interactive animation with photos showing the life cycle of a tree, three different tropical trees with varying characteristics, and the way you can watch your tree grow over time. Checking in on the class tree from time to time will let you look not only at plant development but also at latitude and longitude and other geography topics, human geography, environmental issues, growth and development in general, biomes, and computer skills.
- Look at plants around the world in Google Earth and compare them with the plants in your community. One excellent starting place is the Valley of Flowers in India. Open the file in Google Earth and you will find yourself in an impressively mountainous area. Click on the photos to see lots of pictures of plant life, and check out the video below for more images from the same location. Follow up by creating your own photo files of the plants around your school or your town. Add them to Google Earth and share them in the Google Earth Community. There is a student section where kids can share and discuss their finds. (Note: if you’ve tried the Google Earth Community before and found it hard to use, check out the new interface — it’s a lot friendlier. )
Spreadsheets
I was shocked, in talking with local high school writing teachers, to learn that Excel was one of their go-to software choices for their writing classes. This was, in fact, one of the experiences that inspired FreshPlans — teachers need to know about all the great free and low-cost software for education, so they won’t have to settle for what came on their computers. If you like Excel, though, and feel that everyone needs to be able to use spreadsheet software, this is a great time to use it. If you don’t have Excel, you can also use Google Docs free spreadsheets or Open Office, also free.
Have students create a spreadsheet for a virtual plant collection. Either have one for the whole class, with each student researching and contributing a few plants, or have each student build his or her own virtual plant collection.
- Decide the characteristics that should be included on the spreadsheet. Have students look at various sources of information (California Wildflowers is a good example, and the Lazy Gardener’s Guide is a nice example of a spreadsheet) about plants and list the items of information they include. Possibilities might be the common name(s), the Latin name, the color, the size, the uses, where the plant grows, its place or places of origin, the kind of growing conditions it prefers, and the number or location of a collected specimen or photograph.
- Build the spreadsheet with spaces for the pieces of information you’ve decided to include. At this point, students can practice design and layout of their spreadsheets, considering things like the size of the cell needed for each piece of information.
- Input the information for all the collected plants.
- Try out different ways of sorting the data and decide on the one you’ll use when you publish the spreadsheet.
- Decide how to publish the spreadsheet. Possibilities include keeping it as an ongoing group document to add to in future, printing out the spreadsheets and adding them to a physical plant collection, or including them in a document with photos either on the class computer or in a notebook.
Once students have created their spreadsheets, learn more about how working scientists use the same kinds of skills and procedures the students have experienced. Read about the Field Museum’s plant collections, and how they’re using modern technology to create a database and to make the collections easier to use, while also protecting them. Students are involved in this project, and the article at the link is accessible for high school or middle school students. Check out their searchable databases and discuss how botanists (plant scientists) might use the information they contain.
Photosynthesis Lessons
All the energy on the earth comes from the sun, in one way or another. The energy that plants use is one of the simpler paths for solar energy, since plants are able to take the electromagnetic energy of the sun and use it for fuel. They use that energy to produce things like fruit that we can use for energy ourselves.
The process plants use to make fuel from solar energy is called photosynthesis. “Photo” means light and synthesis is making something, so photosynthesis is the process of making something from light. Often this is as much as students understand about photosynthesis. Get some hands-on practice to get a fuller grasp of the process.
- Light is made up of different colors which have different wavelengths. Green plants absorb red and blue light and reflect green light, so they look green to us. Use a prism to divide light into its component colors. Then learn more about colors and light:
- Rainbows are formed when water in the air acts as a prism. Learn more about rainbows.
- Older students may be interested to know about the RGB system. Whereas we normally think of red, yellow, and blue as the the primary colors, light actually divides best into red, green, and blue. A basic explanation of the system can be followed by an exploration of light with the Hubble telescope.
- Green leaves have chloroplasts in their cells. These chloroplasts contain chlorophyll, a pigment that is very good at trapping the energy of red and blue lightwaves. These chloroplasts makes leaves into little solar cells which trap the energy of sunlight just the way that a solar power array does. Learn more about solar energy.
- Plants use the energy to power chemical reactions. A reaction is what happens when chemicals get together. A great example of a chemical reaction is a glowstick. Inside a glowstick there is a liquid called phenyl oxalate ester, plus dyes for colored glowsticks. Floating in the phenyl oxalate ester is a small glass vial that contains hydrogen peroxide. When you bend and snap a glowstick, the vial breaks, the hydrogen peroxide and the phenyl oxalate ester get together, and you get a chemical reaction. You can — carefully following all lab safety procedures — open up a glowstick so you can see the process. The leaves of a plant pull in carbon dioxide from the air and water from the soil. They divide up the molecules of water into hydrogen and oxygen, adding hydrogen to the carbon dioxide molecules to create glucose for their food. The leftover oxygen is sent back into the air. See the chemical details and equations on UC Clermont’s Photosynthesis page.
- Having combined hydrogen (from water) and carbon dyoxide (from air) to make glucose, the plant now has food. Glucose is a carbohydrate, a sugar in fact. Plants can use this energy to grow and to make flowers, fruit, and seeds. People also use food to grow and develop. Grow beans in your classroom to get a full understanding of how plants grow. When you have a big, strong plant, put a small Post-It note on one of the large leaves and leave it for a week. When you remove it, you’ll see what happens when a leaf is deprived of sunlight.
- Oxygen is a waste product for plants. They take the hydrogen from water (H2O) and the don’t need the leftover oxygen, so they let it go from pores (stomata) on the bottoms of their leaves. This is breathing for plants. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide — which plants need. Plants and animals swap carbon dioxide and oxygen, making a very elegant system. Put an underwater plant into a dish of water in your classroom and put a test tube over it. Put the plant on a sunny windowsill. Oxygen bubbles will come up from the plant into the test tube. If you’re lucky, you’ll see them!
- From the point of view of a plant, fruit is a way to make seeds. If the fruit is not eaten, the seeds will fall to the ground or perhaps be carried by the wind for a little distance. Getting some creature to eat the fruit and take the seeds to another place allows the plant to spread out and make new plants without getting too crowded. In order to convince animals (including people) to eat the fruit, plants use the glucose they create from sun and water to make their fruits sweet. In some classrooms, there may be students who have not eaten fresh vegetables or fruits. If your class is like this, think about growing some sugar snap peas or strawberries in the classroom window or in a school garden. If that’s not practical, bring some fresh carrots or grapes to class and enjoy them together.
Your students should really understand photosynthesis now!
Geography of Ireland Classroom Activities
With St. Patrick’s Day upon us, it’s a great time to learn the geography of Ireland. Any time of year is a great time to improve geography skills, actually, and you can use these ideas with other places, too, but I’ve got some great links for your Ireland study. Here are three excellent ways to learn more about Irish geography. Read more
Happy Pi Day!
Celebrate Pi Day with pies! Josepha shows you how.
Women’s History Lessons
March is Women’s History Month, a time to remember women’s place in history. Times have changed since textbooks talked about “the pioneers and their wives and children,” but it’s still easy to overlook the contributions of women to history if we don’t make an effort.
If you need to make that effort, March is a fine time to do it.
Women’s history resources:
And a few heroes to think about:
Our Study of Heroes includes activities that work well with any biographical study. Here are some more ideas specifically for Women’s History Month:
- Women have expressed themselves through their clothing even during times in history when other forms of self-expression weren’t available to them. Add fashion paper dolls to your classroom timeline to show the clothing women have worn in all the time periods you’ve studied.
- Invite women into your class to discuss the work they do.
- Study the characteristics admired in women at different time periods. Use fairy tales or primary documents to get a sense of the qualities girls were expected to strive for.
- Study wedding customs and how they’ve changed –this is another area in which women’s position in a culture was revealed.
