Raise your hand if you love reading poetry? My hand doesn’t go up and neither do most people’s. However, I love teaching poetry. Poems are short and it’s easy to fit in a bunch of literacy skills in poetry that would take longer with a novel. It’s also great for writing, because poems are short and students that don’t love to write can still write them.
I have a few poetry resources (Poetry Unit, Poetry Task Cards) that I’ve used in my own classroom over the years (read a blog post about them here). However, when I switched to a higher grade level, I looked for resources that I could use to help students do poetry analysis. I absolutely love Stacey Lloyd’s poetry resources, but some were on too high of a level for my students. I decided to create my own that would give students short practice with poems throughout the year.
How to Annotate Poetry?
To help students annotate poetry, you first have to teach students the various types of figurative language and poetic devices commonly used in poems. There are many, so I chose ones that were on a middle school level rather than a college level to make it more reasonable. These are the ones that I usually use with my middle school students, and I take a few out for grades younger than that.
Once students know the terminology, it’s just a matter of giving them a poem that has blank space in the margins, and teaching them to mark it. You can have them mark it however you want, but it usually involves highlighting, underlining, and writing (annotating) in the margins. I have students look for each type of figurative language and poetic device and mark all that they find.
Typically the hardest things for students is the need to read the poem through multiple times. It’s very rare to impossible to capture the whole poem with one reading, so you have to take it slow and reread. This is also great to help build reading fluency for those that need extra practice.
I also like to have my students work together in small groups so that they have the best chance at finding a number of things to annotate on their poem. Once they have time to work through it together, I also go through it with the entire class and give them a chance to share what they’ve found. I can also point out a few extra things they may have missed.
Poetry Analysis
Once the poem has been annotated, then it’s time to analyze. What does the poem mean? What is the theme of the poem? How do the symbols contribute to the poem? What tone is the author portraying?
These are hard questions for students to answer, so we typically work through them together or in small groups. Digging deeper into the poem helps teach students how to analyze and look further for meaning than at surface level.
Annotating and analysis can be done with any poem, and it’s easy to incorporate within your monthly or even weekly routine. If you’re interested in seasonal poems that already contain prompts and an answer key, check out the resources below:
