Poetry: How to love it and get your students to love it too
This workshop offers an A to Z of activities that will stimulate the creative zest in students and help them to understand how poems are made. There will be instruction, through hands-on activities (the same ones you will teach your students), in many many poetry strategies which will unobtrusively teach metaphor, imagery, consonance and rhyme, meter, line breaks, as well as various poetry forms that students love: sestinas, pantoums, ghazals, erasure poems, found poems. In no time they will be writing wonderful poems and enjoying themselves as well. The activities require few props and can be varied for different grade levels. In addition to these handouts, teachers will be offered a great number of model poems to use in the classroom, primarily modern and Canadian.
Getting students to write poetry is really a pleasure when you have a stack of tried and true strategies to set the class writing.
Target Audience
6-12
To Bring/Important Notes
Paper, pen or pencil, curiosity, enthusiasm
Sessions
Presenters
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Planet Earth Poetry
Barbara Pelman
Barbara Pelman is a retired high school English teacher and poet. She has been conducting poetry workshops for the past 20 years, for beginners, practicing poets, and teachers. She has 3 books of poetry ("One Stone", Ekstasis Editions 2005, "Borrowed Rooms", Ronsdale Press, 2008, and "Narrow Bridge" Ronsdale Press 2017) and a fourth to be published in 2023 by Caitlin Press. Her poems have won the Malahat Review Open Season contest, and the Federation of BC Writers poetry contests, and have been published in various literary journals. She is an assistant at Planet Earth Poetry, a weekly poetry reading series which has been ongoing for 26 years. At Reynolds School, where she taught, she established a lunch-time poetry Open Mic, and she continues to encourage a delight in poetry for students and teachers alike.
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Anne Hopkinson
Anne Hopkinson writes poetry from her home in Victoria, and is President of Planet Earth Poetry, a reading series of 26 years. She is a nature lover, retired teacher and water rat. Her work appears in a number of anthologies and journals. She won the Canadian Stories Poetry Prize for 2019. Her work was short-listed for the BC Federation of Writers Poetry Prize in 2019, and in 2021 she won the Emily Carr Poetry Contest in Victoria. Two poems were short-listed for the Nick Blatchford contest in 2022.
