Category: Lesson Plans
Innovative lessons plans and ideas for teaching creative writing as well as samples of student writing resulting from the lessons.
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Survival Island
Using a workshop approach with high school writers.
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Remaining Nameless
How writing anonymous personal narrative essays transformed a bronx classroom.
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Some Victorious Answer to Everything
Bill Murray and Ferlinghetti’s “Dog” as an invitation to write new poetry.
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Walking, Watching, and Writing
How a 17th century Japanese master taught 50 Georgia sophomores the art of contemplative writing and living.
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Multilingual Approaches Toward English Prose
2022 Bechtel Prize Winner Shilpi Suneja’s students make language their subject.
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Voilà!
Raising spirits and conjuring magic in the poetry classroom.
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Birthing Poetry
A window into The Poetry Studio and the new collection, Another World: Poetry and Art by Young People.
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Mixing It Up with Dickinson
Two high school poetry workshops.
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Nature’s Wonder
Finding creativity and connecting writing to the natural world.
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You Never Forget Your Firsts
Making memories vividly present with Mary Kinzie’s “First Passion.”
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It Was the Year of Quiet Cities
Writing poems about pandemic times.
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You Are Who We Love
A lesson plan for collaborative poems inspired by Aracelis Girmay.
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Superheroic Delight Songs
A poetry-inspired mural at Lea Elementary in West Philly.
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Jayne Cortez and the Joyful Anti-Ode
Jayne Cortez’s poem “These New York City Pigeons” inspires student poems in this lesson plan from Joanna Fuhrman.
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The Moment When . . .
In this lesson plan, photographs are used to explore point of view in fiction writing.
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Writing a Contrapuntal Poem
Tools Gathered from Even-Odd Project Elevators
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The Backward Prompt
Using Great First Lines from Literature to Invent Your Own Way Forward
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My Self-Portrait / My Secret Self-Portrait
Lesson by Sheila Maldonado as told to Azka Anwar
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The Parent Poem Project
Using Photographs to Take a Closer Look at Our Parents and Ourselves
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Building a Queer Canon
Reading lists and resources for teaching LGBTQ+ texts in the classroom.
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Writing Our Names
The names we are given, the names we give ourselves, the names society gives us, are powerful kindling for poetry.
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Black Nikes in Red Weather
A Lesson Plan for “Dream Poems”
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How a Spider Web Can Untangle Memoir Writing
The spider web as a helpful tool to map out personal narrative.
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Facts Before Fiction
Writing into Autumn