Sarah Guayante, a student at St. John’s University and a T&W editorial intern, is interviewing teaching artists who take part in the TATIP* program. Martin Urbach, a percussionist who used to teach at Marquis Studios and now teaches full-time, facilitated the TATIP elective seminar on Teaching for Special Needs and Universal Design alongside Phil Alexander…
Author, artist, and T&W writer-in-residence Sarah Porter uses a seventh-grade poetry class to teach common logical fallacies. After reading a list of different fallacies, the class becomes better acquainted with them by writing “lie Poems.” This lesson plan offers a fun, no-stress way to gain skills these students can employ throughout their academic careers. Grade(s)…
Aminata is the youngest of four children, and lives with her parents, originally from Senegal, in the Bronx, where she is a fifth-grader at a New York City public school. She loves playing games on her phone, and was a student in T&W teaching artist Ibi Zoboi’s creative writing class this winter. In an interview…
Dean Kostos, poet, memoirist, translator, and T&W teaching artist, connects history to the present in this lesson on conversation poems featuring Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes. Grade(s) taught: 6th–8th Genre(s) taught: Poetry Download: Conversation Poems Common Core State Standards: (Refer to English Language Arts Standards > History/Social Studies > Grades 6–8) ELA-LITERACY.RH.6-8.4 Determine the meaning of…
To the students of IS 392K (from the introduction to the anthology So Much Depends Upon Stretching Your Positivity) So much depends upon the words gathered here in this collection of your work. This collection of poems means that we worked together on something bigger than ourselves. This collection of poems was “born” from passing…
Sarah Guayante, a student at St. John’s University and a T&W editorial intern, is interviewing teaching artists who take part in the TATIP* program. Amina Henry, a playwright and poet teaching with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, attended the Teaching Theatre & Social Justice seminar facilitated by Patti Chilsen from Community-Word Project and Renée Watson from…
In “Making a Poem Hum,” Terri Glass shares her lesson plan for engaging third- through sixth-graders in creating poems that combine sound and image. The lesson plan comes from Poetry Crossing: 50+ Lessons for 50 Years of California Poets in the Schools. T&W is pleased to work with our California colleagues to share lesson plans from…
by Nathan Snyder and Jack Adam Nathan The NYC iSchool, located in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City, is a public high school that does not operate like a traditional school, in that it charges teachers with creating engaging and authentic learning situations that help students understand the reasons for learning that transcend scoring…
This writing lesson plan demonstrates how to handle unfamiliar complex texts in this lesson plan on Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 138.” In addition to strategies for breaking down new texts, the lesson begins by analyzing Shakespeare and the implications of his sonnet. This well-rounded lesson provides middle school students with tools that will prove invaluable during their upcoming high school years.