Poetry Analysis

HAVE YOU EVER….needed something and wished you had it right on hand?!

This resource is for you! I’m telling you- I looked at the CCSS exemplar texts for poetry and knew I needed to kick my butt into gear to get my kids ready for some rigorous poetry but still have a meaningful experience!

I set out research public domain poems that would be great and challenging for my students. This resource saved my poetry teaching. The ones with our reading series (if any!) are small and not given much attention!!! This was a huge wake up call.

I chose to study this in December not April (National Poetry Month) because we need to get in the vocabulary surrounding poems and practicing the skills used to analyze much longer before state testing. I LOVE fun rhyming poetry but obviously that was not going to get my students to where they needed to be – much to my dismay 🙁

This labor of love is packed with so many truly great poems by classic authors – just ready for students! Check out the many uses below.

Comparing 2 William Blake poems (hello CCSS.RL.9 – SO TRICKY!!) There are more comparisons included as well!

For the few poems I couldn’t include the text there are QR codes (and just web links!) to reach these poems! This made CENTERS a breeze for poetry month!! The questions are tricky but I let them work with pairs at centers for plenty of practice as a class, in pairs, and independently as well.

Here we are comparing “The Eagle” by Tennyson and “How Doth the Little Crocodile” by Lewis Carroll. This was one we worked on as a class so they understand the vocabulary in the question and what it was asking. We brainstormed ideas together and they wrote the paragraph answer in their notebooks which I went around and checked as their exit slip while they moved onto reading rotations (spelling choices, grammar, literacy skill)

Click any of the pictures to get more info! This is truly something that saved my poetry unit and really vamped up the rigor! Check it out if yours could use some updating too!

The sheets work great for CENTERS, homework, independent class work, assessments, and I included answer keys for all sheets along with small copies for interactive notebooks!

Below is another sample page of the type of questions and poem selection. We spent about 3 weeks in December on poetry studying and analyzing while creating some of our own.