Inside: The brain that does the reading does the learning. All too often teachers are unknowingly doing the bulk of heavy thinking for our students. It’s time to empower our students to do the analysis. Below you will find middle school poetry activities that put the learning and thinking in the students’ hands.
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Who is Doing the Learning?
Here you are, having launched the most engaging poetry unit ever and having selected the best poems, but what now?
Now, you have to get your middle school students to do the thinking about poetry. It’s all too tempting to hand students a worksheet that pre-analyzes the poem for them. It’s easy, but the students aren’t doing the bulk of the work.
It takes a lot of brain power to ask higher order questions, but if students aren’t analyzing and making their own inferences, they will be hard pressed to ask or answer a higher level question. Worse yet, guess whose brain is doing most of the work? The teacher’s brain! I don’t know about you, but my teacher brain is already wiped out.
Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE a good close read, but students also need to know how to comprehend a poem when reading independently. Over 14 years as an English teacher has taught me that there are 2 main issues with comprehending poetry: vocabulary and figurative language. Students get stuck on these reading road bumps and struggle to find their way around them.
Where Do I Start?
Before students can learn to ask higher order questions, they need to understand how to analyze a text. Analysis simply means studying something by breaking it into smaller pieces. Once they break text into more manageable chunks, they are in a better place to ask higher order questions.
This is Literally the Best!
Bright students are often tempted to infer what a poem means before realizing what it actually says. Repeatedly, I see them miss the actual meaning of a poem because they confused the literal details.
Below you will find the 2 best strategies for teaching poetry analysis, and hallelujah, they work with middle schoolers – among many age groups! Also – they work well with many other genres.
Middle School Poetry Activities!
To get started, choose a poem – any poem. Click here for my recommendations for middle school poetry.
Activity 1: Color Coded Comprehension
Students Objective: I can analyze poetry to increase my comprehension.
Materials: One copy of a poem per student, two different colored highlighters or colored pencils per student.
Steps:
- Students silently read the poem. Kelly Gallagher’s Deeper Reading conveys the importance of multiple draft reads.
- After reading, students highlight or underline what they understand in one color, and what they are not sure about in another color. High contrast colors work best.
- Have students compare/contrast their highlighted areas with their table group or shoulder partner. Ask them to share what they do understand and see if their help each other with comprehension. This conversation can be casual and unstructured or structured using any TTQQ
or Kagan Cooperative Learning protocols.
- Next, students look up unfamiliar words and phrases in the dictionary, writing the meaning on the side of the poem. Teachers will supervise what students are discovering and work one-on-one with students who seem very stuck.
- Debrief as a class, sharing words and phrases discovered.
or Anticipate Differentiation:
- Students who say they understand all parts of the poem. Say, “I look forward to you sharing what you know with the class.” Encourage them to read the poem again and reevaluate their comprehension. If they really do understand it, have them annotate what they know and make inferences about the poem’s meaning.
- Students who feel uncomfortable admitting what they don’t understand. Model this process before asking students to do this independently. Show them the academic humility of what it looks like to sort through your own comprehension. They will likely be more willing to honestly evaluate their own understanding.
Finding the 5Ws
Often times, my students freak out about NOT understanding a poem, especially after highlighting it. I tell them to summarize it anyways! Yes, there are aspects of the poem that you don’t understand, but you can still figure out the who, what, when, where, and why of the poem without knowing what everything means. This holds true for most poems.
- Who is the poem about? Who is the speaker of the poem?
- Teach the difference between the speaker and the poet. The poet wrote the poem, and the speaker is the character (narrator) telling the poem. They may not always be the same person.
- Where does the poem take place?
- Look for location words
- When does the poem take place?
- Time period or time of day
- Look for time words like: before, after, forever, and tomorrow, someday, later, and when.
- What happens in this poem?
- Write a one sentence summary of what is happening in the poem
- Why did the poet write the poem?
- What did they want the reader to get out of it?
- What message were they trying to convey. This step can get figurative, but it’s the last step of the process, so it’s a good bridge into analyzing theme.
- Class share out: If you have the students find the 5Ws on their own, model the correct answers for them. Ask students to provide their answers and fill in what they miss.
Structured response: After figuring out the 5Ws of the poem, how do you better understand the poem? What did you learn or realize from finding the 5Ws?
Exit Ticket/Closing Task: Write a one sentence summary of what this poem is mostly about. This single sentence helps you understand if students understood the poem.
The first time I use this strategy, I ask each 5W question to the full class, which allows me to gauge their general understanding. Then, students practice on their own – this can be a struggle. Don’t forget: productive struggle is healthy for learning! See an example of this strategy on my TPT store.
Differentiation: If you’re teaching students with special needs, who may especially struggle with understanding the figurative, give them an annotation code. I use: Draw a box around the who, circle the where, and underline the why.
Why These Strategies Work
Color code comprehension:
- Knowing what you don’t know is crucial to learning. Harvard Business Review argues that, “Discovering your explanatory gaps [What you are unable to articulate in conversation] is essential for aspiring inventors.” In order do grow, you have to
know what you don’t know. - This strategy allows students to learn where their comprehension breaks down, and spend their energy working to understand those sections.
5Ws:
- Students will feel successful with poetry when they know what they’re looking for, and the 5Ws provides that.
- Also, it works with any poem, which provides a consistent structure to analyze, causing students to develop a thinking pattern. Understanding patterns requires way more brain power than answering a singular question tied to one text. Just ask Jeff Andersen, who popularized teaching grammar in context by noticing patterns of power! Patterns of Power: Inviting Young Writers into the Conventions of Language, Grades 1-5
They work because – believe it or not – students DO want to learn how to analyze. They’re often too afraid that they will look dumb if they can’t. Give them these tools to help increase their confidence and ability.
