Climb Inside a Poem: Reading and Writing Poetry Across the Year, Georgia Heard and Lester Laminack (First Hanc Heinemann, 2008) – The authors of this collection of curriculum resources, specifically for K-2 students and teachers, demonstrate how reading and writing poetry can also support and extend young children’s language and literacy development. Through an anthology of original children’s poems and related lessons, the book shows how to weave poetry into the fabric of a school day by reading a variety of poems for a variety of purposes.
 
Handbook of Poetic Forms, Editor Rod Padgett (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2000) – This bestselling reference guide includes over 70 entries on traditional and modern poetic forms. Arranged in alphabetical order, each entry is allotted 1-7 pages with examples and histories of forms and ideas for using each form.
 
The Poet’s Pen: Writing Poetry with Middle and High School Students, Betty Bonham Lies (Libraries Unlimited, 1993) – This book offers practical advice on teaching the technical aspects of poetry, suggesting ways to revise work and overcome writer’s block and discussing how to integrate poetry writing into the core curriculum. The book includes guidelines and tools for starting a poetry writing program along with numerous exercises, examples of student work, an annotated bibliography of sources for further ideas and a glossary of poetic terms.
 
Poetry: Powerful Thoughts in Tiny Packages, Lucy McCormick Calkins and Stephanie Parsons (Heinemann, 2003) – A year-long curriculum focused on engaging students to learn to go beyond rhyming  to find precise images that represent big ideas. This extremely useful and teacher friendly book provides a holistic approach to teaching poetry writing while also introducing foundational poetic devices such as using line breaks to express meaning and create rhythm and using visualization and figures of speech to make writing more clear and powerful.
 
Rip the Page: Adventures in Creative Writing, Karen Benke (Roost Books, 2010) – This guide highlights ideas and experiments that unfold student imagination and inspire writing, including prompts to spark new poems and letters of encouragement from famous authors.
 
Risking Intensity: Reading and Writing Poetry With High School Students, Judy Rowe Michaels (National Council of Teachers of English, 1999) – A holistic approach to teaching the literary arts that emphasizes the creative process, this book guides the reader through the creative process and features time-tested activities for teaching the creative process to students.
 
Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem: A Guide to Writing Poetry, Wendy Bishop (Longman, 1999) – The book’s unique approach of teaching the elements of poetry through various poetic forms encourages students to learn from existing models and to break free from pre-established constraints. The book features thirteen chapters centered on different forms of poetry including the sonnet, the haiku and other traditional and not-so-traditional forms as well as numerous innovative exercises.

Artist in the Spotlight

Event Spotlight

Rick Estrin & The Nightcats

March 30
at Arena Theater
in Point Arena.