Poetry Exploration Stations

Have you used stations in your secondary classroom yet? If you haven't...now is the time! 

Why Stations?

* Station activities allow for collaboration and give students the opportunity to rely on peer helpers rather than rushing to the teacher with every question that arises. 

* Station time engages the students in short activities that would usually be completed in a whole class setting, but keeps the time limited in order to keep their attention. 

* Station time also frees up the teacher to facilitate, answer questions, conference with students, complete check-ins with struggling students, and spend individual or small group time with students that would not typically happen in a whole-class instruction based course. 

And for these reasons...I love stations! And my students do, too!

Poetry Exploration Stations

One of my favorite ways to incorporate stations into my class is to use them as introductions at the start of a unit. I've always found poetry difficult to begin. There didn't seem to be any logical transition from the previous unit that I could tie into, and if you're following the National Poetry Month (April) schedule, it often is broken up by Spring Break and other in-service times. It can feel very disjointed and much like an afterthought of the curriculum. 

An introduction that uses the station model, however, offers students the chance to play around with poetry, to take risks in a low-stakes way before they've learned all of the terms, tools, and techniques that famous poets use. They get to be poets before any rule tells them they've done it wrong. 

There are an infinite number of station options you could create, but these are some of my favorite to include:

- Illustrated Poetry- this allows creative and artistic students to thrive through simple analysis of a poem's meaning. It requires some critical thinking, but is generally an easy introduction into analyzing poems. 

- Newspaper Cutout Poetry- Students find words to cut out of the newspaper in order to create their own poem. This takes attention to finding the right words to tell the right story. This station often is harder than students think it will be initially because they tend to try to take words from the same article and end up summarizing an article rather than writing a poem. 

- Redacted Poetry- This is often called "blackout poetry," but one of my freshmen decided "redacted" sounded cooler, so I've been using it ever since. This is all about the black space on the page and using it to make strong word choice selections, in an order that creates a poem. This can build students' skills in diction and meaning. 

- Magnetic Poetry- Most English teachers I know have at least one set of magnetic poetry that we got in the early 2000's and have had hidden in a drawer since then. It is time to dust it off and give students another avenue to create poetry. Similar to newspaper and redacted, this form of poetry requires students to manipulate individual words, including word endings, to create a poem. 

- Scrabble Poetry- My students love that they get to play Scrabble in class, but with one catch. Every word they put on the board must be the next word in a poem they are creating. It definitely makes Scrabble more difficult and helps with word and letter manipulation. 

- Poetry Slam!- Most of my students hate speaking in front of others, so the idea of expressively speaking a poem with exaggerated emphasis sounds like torture. This is a great way to do a personal poetry slam, to try out that genre of speaking, while only performing for a camera, a close friend, or even the wall. This gives students the confidence to try this form of public speaking later. 

Looking for Poetry Station resources? Check out my Poetry Exploration Stations pack on TeachersPay Teachers which includes detailed instructions for students, a pre-made portfolio presentation for students as they complete each station, and suggested lesson plans for 2-3 days of poetry stations!

Wondering where to go from here? My Poetry Tools Review presentation includes all of the terms, tools, and types of poems for an entire unit of study. Use it as a guide to help you plan the framework of your poetry unit. Add example poems from your own curriculum to supplement, and you've got an entire unit of study completed!