Text Structures from Poetry, Grades 4-12: Lessons to Help Students Read, Analyze, and Create Poems They Will Remember, Feb/2020

Poetry is a joyful art form, but how do you teach students to joyfully read, analyze, and write poems? In Text Structures from Poetry, Grades 4-12, award-winning educator Gretchen Bernabei teams up with noted poet Laura Van Prooyen to light the path.

Centered around 50 classroom-proven lesson and poem pairs, the mentor texts represent a broad range of voices in contemporary poetry and the canon. These unique and engaging lessons show educators how to “pop the hood” on a poem to discover what makes it work, using text structures to unlock the engine of a poem.  This method enables educators to engage students in reading and re-reading a poem closely, to identify how the parts of the poem relate to each other to create movement, and to leverage what they have learned to write their own evocative poems. 

Each of the 50 lessons includes a mentor poem that serves as an excellent model for young writers, a diagram that illustrates the text structure of the poem, and several inspiring examples of student poems written to emulate the mentor poem. Easy-to-use instructional resources enhance instructor and student understanding and include: 

1. Teaching notes for unlocking the text structure of a poem and the engine that makes it work.
2. Tips for exploring rhyme scheme, meter, and fixed forms.
3. Instructional sequences that vary the ways students can read and write poems and other prose forms.
4. Ideas for revising and publishing student poems.
5. A “Meet the Contemporary Authors” section that includes fascinating messages from the contemporary poets.

Teach your students to learn about poetry using the magic of poems themselves and lead the way to a rewarding love of poetry for teachers and students alike. 

About the Authors:

A popular workshop presenter and winner of NCTE’s James Moffett Award in 2010, Gretchen Bernabei has been teaching kids to write in middle school and high school classrooms for more than thirty years. In addition to four other professional books and numerous articles for NCTE journals, she is the author of National Geographic School Publications’ The Good Writer’s Kit, as well as Lightning in a Bottle, a CD of visual writing prompts.

Laura Van Prooyen is author of two collections of poetry, Our House Was on Fire (Ashland Poetry Press 2015) and Inkblot and Altar (Pecan Grove Press 2006). She has more than 20 years experience teaching poetry and writing in a variety of academic settings including: Dominican University, Chicago Public Schools, Del Valle High School, and Henry Ford Academy: The Alameda School for Art + Design. Presently, Van Prooyen teaches in the Low-Res MFA Creative Writing Program at Miami University in Oxford, OH and lives in San Antonio, TX.