poeTRY Challenge

I am in the middle of a poetry unit with my middle school students, and in an effort to avoid jumping out the my classroom window and running for the hills in pure frustration, I had to come up with something to get my students to TRY at poetry.

Me: "What is the extended metaphor in Road Not Taken?"
Class: Silence
Me: "Anyone?"Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

::sigh::

So, as all best made plans are created, I came up with something on the way to school.

My original plan consisted of reading Still I Rise independently, annotating, and then having a seminar.  We have done several seminars with poetry, but I'm finding that the same students are talking.
 
I love seminars, but I just couldn't do another one today.  I needed something different.

I decided to come up with a poeTRY challenge!

How I rolled it out...

1. I put the students in partners

2. The students read and annotated the poem together

3.  When they finished, they grabbed a computer and logged into Google Classroom and took a short 10 question Quiz Bowl challenge (basically it was just multiple choice questions about the poem...I just called it a Quiz Bowl. Instant fun).

4. After they finished, the scores were immediately released.  They put the scores on a little grid I created on my Smart Board.

5.  The highest scores won a little prize.

The best thing was watching them read and talk about the meaning of the poem!  They were intent on understanding so they could win.


Happy Teaching,

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